@@EddieDalmunda haha, reminds me of how Terminators have always been shown to have some semblance of emotion. It's a weird concept, but it's there. They weren't designed to have emotions. But they do... in a way. "this is not the outcome desired... and I don't like that." sort of thing.
There's a lot of neurodivergent reading of Data, and there is a book that posits that cats are autistic (cats and humans on the autistic spectrum display very similar behaviour). Data also created a massive menu for Spot to eat.
Only cat-typical cats are autistic. Its a startling difference when you have one of each. ( especially a large breed like Maine Coon or Norwegian Forrest Cat . they are chill & more social but the flip side is they expect interaction and the cost of them listening to you, giving you neurotypical attention is expecting to be listened to when they want to )
For me one of the biggest indicators Data does have some type of emotion is the final exchange between Data and Soong himself in ‘Brothers.’ Data says “You know I cannot grieve for you, sir.” And Soong replies - “You will, in your own way.” To me this implies that Data does experience emotion, just in a very different and unique manner. The emotion chip just makes those feelings more overt and palatable to human expectations. For a robot or an alien, emotions may be stunningly and intricately more diverse than we would ordinarily think, to the point in which they may be difficult to even recognize or appreciate, and that doesn’t make one better than the other - it just makes them different.
From a scientific perspective. Biological beings experienced evolutionary advantageous chemical simulations to certain situations. Given Soong's insistence to make androids passable as humanity, personality albeit not programmed in any individual (artificial or not) will naturally manifest approximations by proxy of appropriated social situations seemed advantageous. We generally regard emotion separate to personality however which gives the rather mundane answer unlock to Data of less controllable approximated subconscious expressions
Honestly, that's my read too. Data has emotions. They just aren't like neurotypical human emotions. As an autistic person, Data's emotional spectrum often feels similar to mine - difficult to pinpoint and express in ways recognisable to neurotypical people. I do struggle to recognise my emotions and even if I'm having one if it's not a passionate or intense emotion.
@@majuuorthrus3340 This. Even if it's just a failure of the writers as emotional human beings, a lot of Data's behaviour seems to be dictated by some kind of "emotion", his most overt emotion being curiosity.
My take was that Data actually was slowly developing emotions on his own. So slowly that Data himself didn't even realize it. The emotion chip was basically a cheat code to get him to the end result, but he probably would've gotten there on his own in about forty or fifty years or so.
Perhaps in his noted wish to be human he slowly observed and took in the emotional behaviors of his crewmates and attempted to emulate those actions and thoughts when applicable.
@@KujouCh I kind of assume he's had the emotions all along, he wouldnt even be able to long for emotions without an emotional drive, but what he lacks is the ability to perceive them because he tricked himself into not looking for them
If anything, the emotion chip just gave him a main hub where he can process it, before that he slowly learned around his neural net, now the chip streamlines how its processed.
I always felt that there might of been a chance that Data had some level of emotional capacity all along but it was one that simply doesn't translate to an organic understanding of emotion.
This is what I favour: he has non-logical preferences, which are "emotions" and are valid but not easily recognised by the organics (nearly all humans) around him.
Through observation, Data could certainly emulate emotions, or begin to understand what will cause emotional responses in others, especially those he knows well (so manipulation Picard becomes a possibility). Given that Data's positronic brain has the ability to work with the cheap means the capacity for emotions must exist- even if he cannot normally express them without updating his drivers or whatever. I feel he experienced "proto-emotions" from time to time, but rarely enough that he could still say in a given moment that he was incapable of feeling them. Not bad for a brain that is merely twice as powerful as the most advanced computer we have today!
@@PositionLight yeah, it's liek the terminator analogy. Terminators have very complex decision-making behaviors... that often make NO sense to Humans. Why? Because the machines have an utterly alien concept of emotion. It's most easily visible when they get angry. But it comes up in more ways than that.
I figured it is almost a necessary part of sentience, emotion is often used just to allow rapid decision making so to have preferences and such would already beget a rudimentary form, and Data shows capacity a good bit beyond that. Now, it might be that he wants a fuller range, and that is perfectly reasonable, but he definitely has SOME
@@jamesgasik3424 I think the strongest evidence of his emotions is the episode with his daughter Laal. Although he says he cannot feel love for her, he does in his way. At the end of the episode he transfers her memories to his and talks about how she so enriched his life. There is some sort of feeling there
I’m actually really surprised that you didn’t bring up Data‘s dedication to his daughter, Lal. If you want to think like a computer, the logical thing to do would’ve been to just deactivate a defective piece of hardware. But, Data worked feverishly to try to repair the malfunction. In addition, he was there with her to say goodbye as she slipped away to nothingness. On top of all that, rather than just eliminating the programs, he transferred them over to his own positronic brain. I’m sure there are ways to work around that, but for my money as a father, that is Data having emotions towards his offspring.
I was thinking the same thing ... Data showed a lot of emotion with Lal ... when Commander Riker was flirting with Lal in 10Forward and his efforts to save Lal. To me, him having no emotions would have caused him to deactivate her before the system failure, but he actively tried to save her. At some level, he had some type of emotions.
He also has been showing some level of care and compassion in the fact that he has his own pet cat that he voluntarily took on. A pet that, despite a public image that would indicate otherwise, both needs and exhibits a fondness and preference toward his owner.
There was also Data's interactions with Spot in so many episodes. His concern that Warf would feed, water and nit leave her alone too much, his irritation when he was trying to get her to "follow his commands" and she kept jumping up on his console while he was on the computer, his concern for Spot's kittens when she disappeared, and so many more. there were subtle hints all through the series, even his concern for Lore.
@@jacklow9611 I think that Data does have emotions but he cannot feel or express them as intensely as his brother, Lore. This was likely intentional on Dr. Soong's part so that Data doesn't lash out at people in a fit of temper over a perceived offense or allow his emotions to overpower his good judgment. But throughout the series, we can clearly see that Data can enjoy things, be fascinated by things, show concern and bond with people and animals, even show annoyance when people mispronounce his name, and even anger when his subordinates are unwilling to obey his orders.
Not to mention some key dialogue between Crusher and Data, when Data approaches her for parenting advice, and Crusher tells him of the importance of giving children love and attention, and Data says, "I can give her all the attention (paraphrased) but I cannot give her love." "Now why do I have a hard time believing that?" Or the moment that Data opens his mouth to respond to Lal's proclamation of love as she is dying, before uttering that he cannot share in the feeling with her. Who wants to bet he was on the verge of saying it back to her? I will never forgive the writers and producers of TNG for killing off Lal; she had so much character potential, both for herself and for Data, and she wouldn't even have to be a huge character, either; she could have appeared in one to three episodes per season, allowing the producers to work around Hallie Todd's schedule with any other projects she was involved in.
I have an anecdote that might be a good analogy for Data's emotions: A couple of months back, I got a new smart TV, but it couldn't connect to the wi-fi router because there was a patch that needed to be downloaded first, which I initially wasn't told about. However, the TV was somehow able to piggy-back off the printer and use it as a router to connect to the actual router to the internet. I didn't push any buttons: the TV figured that out on its own and added the printer as a network for streaming. However, this streaming was slow and choppy, and I continued to look up how to fix the problem so that I could get REAL streaming. Once I got a USB drive with the appropriate software and plugged it into the TV, the networks updated, and the TV started working just as it should be... although every once in a while it still tries to piggy-back off the printer. I think the hardware for emotions was always there for Data, but lacked the appropriate drivers to appropriately use them: like a Smart TV that can't connect to a router, but knows it should connect to SOMETHING, and chooses a printer instead.
That is what I was thinking along the lines of too. It’s not like you either have emotions or don’t, there are a lot of them out there. It’s obvious Data has some emotions, he just lack the ability to process them properly without his chip.
My interpretation is that Data can’t FEEL emotions as physical sensations until the chip but that he has some intellectual/analytical approximation of emotional motivation and understanding the entire time. Throughout the series he expresses desires, curiosities, concern for the well being of others, etc. While not justifying his motivation with an appeal to feelings, there does seem to be something at the very least adjacent to emotion there.
yeah he just doesn’t feel anything in his gut basically. to him, fear means “i’m in danger” instead of “i feel sick to my stomach and i can barely think.” once he has the emotion chip, fear can totally overwhelm him.
I think thats true. He's also missing emotional valence towards most sensations. But i think he does possess some emotion but its mostly in a monoband of fascination- curiosity. This is akin to sepia. Its definitely a color. But as its neither black & white nor has any valence or contrasting emotions , and is subtle, he lacks an ability to perceive it as an emotion. If you saw everything in one color you could never explain to someone else you see a color, nor know you do. In humans our emotions themselves can produce emotional responses & we ( sometimes ) are aware of both even at the same time. Data lacks this self awareness without the chip. It might have been on purpose to prevent emotional psychsocial conflicts in his early development. His daughter was capable and it may have backfired. Lore was a giant mess. But his "mother" Android was ok, and it may have been because She already developed ( Soong could ve wiped her memory of her growing up once she developed and programmed her as his wife . just as he did with Data )
He has all the cognitive aspects of emotion that a mere machine wouldn't, wanting company sometimes and preferring the company of certain people to others, doing stuff that interested him, wanting to be helpful and to have a sense of purpose, a sense of self preservation and the need to decide his own fate; But not the physical sensations that accompany these wants and needs, the jolt of fear, the euphoria of love, the lethargy of sadness etc... which would require having an endocrine system and receptors in the brain that give us the responses to its chemicals that we think of as our emotions.
Data could have simply told him "I am not the only android. I have a brother, so to complete your collection you would have to aquire him as well" Data Lore team up!
The Most Toys is one of the best episodes of TNG! There is ironically a lot of emotion in it. Data thinks, wrestles with his conscience, decides to murder Fajo and then lies about it afterwards is a great sequence, but I really like the little bit where he sits in the chair and complies to save a life. He shows such compassion and sympathy in that episode as well as defiance.
I always took it that when he says that to Riker... the way he says it and the look he gives Riker (and the understanding look that Riker gives back) he's saying without saying "yeah, I figured I had no choice" and Riker's like "it's cool, buddy, I've been there."
@@shadizersilverhand2113 Nope! Still murder! A unilateral decision to end someone's life? He wasn't protecting anyone else or himself, just killing to get rid of a bad person. Like Dexter 😁
@@sarahscott5305 nope, not murder. Of course he'd have been protecting himself and others. Left alive he'd someday if able to escape custody he'd be back looking to recreate his collection including Data and as an obvious sociopath who casually horribly murdered someone right before Data's eyes surely has murdered other people to get his way. Execution is what he deserved.
You didn't mention the best example. In the episode the Next Phase, they believe that Gordi was dead. Data is worried about how to do the funeral and basically calls Gordi his best friend. In the shuttle he makes it very clear that he will miss him. If he didn't have emotions he would care that Gordi was presumed dead or how to grieve basically. He has emotions, he just doesn't express it in the way that "humans" do, nor is he aware of them due to be told they don't exist.
There is an argument to be made that his expression is a logical behavior to better integrate and work with the crew. The definition of emotion is hard enough to sift through. We've been trying for 60,000+ years to define what emotions actually are. Logically is is beneficial to express the behavior of grief at the loss of someone simply to improve the function of others by showing a series of actions that look like grief to benefit the others whom are also grieving. It is beneficial in a social organization to share in responses. Logically the execution in turn could be just a simple function of assessing what the emotional response of the survivors and that killing him is the optimal solution. When transported, Data simply reassessed the consequences and calculated that the execution wasn't optimal, the omission of the attack was the better response. The confrontation at the cell may seem like gloating, or simply Data assessing if the threat is in fact neutralized to a sufficient capacity. The question of Data having emotions is no different then asking if a complete psychopath has emotions. They can express things that look like emotions, but are they genuine or simple emulations of a sincere emotional response. Any complex system may exhibit 'emotions' but they could be just a projection of human emotions to something that doesn't actually have emotions ("That storm sounds angry"). Data clearly on too many occasions show clear examples of behaviors that look like emotions, but in reality the only one that could answer that is Data himself since we still can't answer it for ourselves, I doubt Data could either. On the other hand... who's to say if the storm is, in fact, angry? Only the storm could answer that. What is anger but a response to specific inputs? I slap you, you get angry, raise the humidity and the storm gets angry. Is it any less or more anger?
Data may have used the term "miss" but "miss" to an android/robot/computer is not an emotion as it is with humans. There is a circuit known as a missed-pulse detector. It isn't displaying an emotion either.
I tend to be of the opinion that before the installation of the emotion chip, Data did have some basic very unsophisticated emotions. Not deliberately programmed into him, but more a simple byproduct of him having an ethical program. For example, his decision to kill Fajo isn’t the product of a burning sense of vengeance, but rather his ethical program reaching the conclusion that it’s the surest way to stop Fajo killing anyone else, which is sort of why we emotional humans do instinctively seek vengeance; to stop a wrongdoer from doing further wrong. So a very basic stem perhaps of the emotion, but one that can’t really come fully into bloom without the emotion chip.
His ethical subrotines is actually what makes him function so well in society. Everyone is all about Asimov's laws of robotics, but forget what Asimov tried to say with them: That they don't work. We can't just tell a robot what they can and can't do. We have to program them with a huge set of databases and algorithms to decide what is right and wrong. If I order my robot to make me tea, the robot will go and make tea. But what if there is a baby in the way, lying on the ground? The robot would just walk through it. Okay, lets put a big off switch on the robot, so that I can jump in and stop it. But if I do that the robot can't follow my order and make tea. So it will prevent me from turning it off. Okay, lets put the off switch higher than following orders. What happens? I tell the robot to make tea, and the robot turns itself off, because that is better than following orders. What if I prevent the robot from interacting with the off switch? The next generation won't have that switch, because robots can't interact with it and can't put the switch on other robots. What if I simply program in that stepping on babies is bad. Which directive is more important, following my orders or avoiding babies? Would the robot just stand there and wait for me to remove the baby? but if I program the robot with ethical and moral code and the ability to problem solve by itself, it would come up with something that gives me my tea and keeps the baby safe. Like going around it, or picking it up and carefully putting it aside. Another example. Let's say there is a bad guy in a plane (or spaceship or whatever), and he intends to fly the plane/spaceship into a group of people. There is also a robot on board that follows the laws of robotics. The robot has to protect itself, follow orders, and avoid harming people or letting them come to harm by inactivity,. In increasing priority. The robot can't use force to get the baddie out of the cockpit, because he could be harmed. So robot wants to go into the cockpit to take over the plane and prevent the bad guy from doing his plan, saving all the people. But the bad guy orders the robot to stay out of the cockpit and not interfere with the plan. Now the robot has an issue. It has to save the people, because not doing anything would cause harm. It can't enter the cockpit, because that would go against orders and might require harming the baddie. it can't manually control the plane because again, against orders. A robot with ethical code would analyse the situation and come to the conclusion that lightly injuring one bad guy would be morally better than being passive or leaving. So the robot goes into the cockpit, subdues the baddie, makes contact with ATC and lands the plane at the next airport. Saving not only his own existence and the targeted people, but the bad guy as well. What does that have to do with Data? He has moral and ethical code that moves him towards doing the "right" thing. There is one episode where something bad happens and the entire ship is moved away and everyone's memory of the event is wiped. Only Data knows what happens, and he won't tell. Even when ordered to do so. So the crew wants to go there again to figure out what happened. In the end they had made contact with very aggressive aliens that usually kill everyone that comes to them, and the crew has decided that wiping their memories would mean nobody has to die and the aliens accepted. Data prefers staying quiet and not following an order by his superiors, because it is the right thing.
I always saw Data as someone who has emotions, but is unable to communicate them, even to himself. There are no words do describe how Data feels, so he concludes that he does not feel.
He could probably put his unique emotional range into words, but why would he bother? He was taught from "birth" that he has no emotion; ergo, he won't bother to contextualize his sensations as emotions. Then he gets the chip, expecting to feel intense emotion; so he's more willing to describe himself in emotional terms. The chip itself could be a placebo and still mean the world to him for this reason.
@@evapadilla8342 Pretty much. Being mildly alexithymic myself, as part of a whole heap of other neurodivergence, I find it particularly amusing that my family had nicknamed me Data as a teen, back when TNG was first running. Definitely better than how we called my sister Worf because of her wild hair and temper!
There's a fantastic (now noncanon, sadly) Trek book called Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory, where Dr. Soong survives in an android body and keeps tabs on Data and Lore, and when he learns that Data installed the emotion chip, he reflects to himself that Data always had to have some kind of emotions, otherwise he'd have no will or desire to do anything. Curiosity, loyalty, a desire for harmony, a drive to improve himself, a sense of duty, a passion for art and music, close bonds with other beings...Data didn't experience emotions the same way humans do, but he was a very driven and passionate person, even if he didn't realize it.
I always saw the episodes "Measure of a Man" and "Offspring" as two of the clearest examples of Data expressing emotion. In the trial in the former, he was clearly bothered by revealing his relationship with Tasha. That is very much an example of emotion. And when he was trying desperately to save Lal, those who saw it remarked on it, including Dr. Crusher and Admiral Haftel.
I’m part of the group that says Data had emotions. He had a best friend and a pet. He understood the feelings of the Betazed that ran away with Tin Man. He had a daughter. I suppose that someone could explain all that away, but I choose to believe that it means that he has feelings, but they are suppressed, and the emotion chip removes the restraint.
This is the theory I think is probably closer to what the writers probably had in mind, that he has emotions but that they were switched off or suppressed. We see examples of this, in the episode when Data is recalled by Soong, and when he's in the lab, Soong just tells him where the information in his mind will be and Data is able to access it, which implies that there are levels of his mind he can't access directly without assistance. Another example of this is the dream program that gets kicked off by the energy beam contact in the cross over episode with Bashir. I think that Data was supposed to eventually get to the point that emotions were unlocked, but Soong was dying and wanted to give Data a gift, and the chip was designed to remove the suppression of emotions.
Perhaps, through Data, TNG is trying to explore how emotion is defined. Even if he is not feeling "real human emotions", his positronic brain could have created some proxy which serves a similar purpose but manifests in a less familiar way.
Data has always seemed very neurodivergently coded to me. As a part of that, there is a type of neurodivergence that makes it difficult or impossible for people with it to identify their own emotions. Personally, I always figured that Data did have emotions he just couldn't identify them or experienced them differently to other people and the chip just allowed him to understand and experience them in a more neurotypical way
Yes indeed, I can't help but think that if we were to get stories about Data being written today the neurodivergent allegory would be ladled on thicker than clotted cream.
Exactly how I see it. I also think this was exactly according to Soong's design. After the failure that was Lore, Daddy Soong needed to tweak Data's 'emotional subroutines' just a tad. He's also enough of a bastard to straight up lie to his son about the whole 'no emotions' thing.
My wife wrote several fanfics about Data a few years back, driven by spite over her dislike of the movie Nemesis. The assumption she and I came up with while figuring out the plot was that Data possesses basic emotions at an unconscious level, but has a deliberate block which prevents him from consciously feeling or being aware of those emotions in any way. The "emotion chip" was essentially just acting as a bridge to allow him to actually feel and be aware of those unconscious emotions. We based this both on observing that Data many times acted as if he had fundamental emotional drives and motivations for his behavior throughout the show, as well as reasoning what would have been the easiest and most likely development path for Doctor Soong to have followed. Soong had already developed an emotional android with Lore, but Lore was unstable and ruled by rapidly changing emotions. Leaving the emotions in place but blocking the connection from the emotional generation code to Data's conscious decision-making would have been a lot easier than redesigning the entire brain to have no emotions at all, and it would also make it easier to patch emotions back in later.
I like to use a Terminator analogy. Terminators are designed by Skynet to be remorseless killers hunting down Humans without pity.... and yet... they seemingly have emotions. Not the same as Human emptions to be sure, but still.... they can get angry, confused, and in the case of Cromartie... get annoyed because someone is wasting his time. that was a particularly creative one. Cromartie is trying to find the Human resistance fighters in the present day, he finds a teen who claims to have useful info, drives around for a while but gets annoyed at the girl for babbling about nonsense Cromartie didn't care about for an hour or so... so Cromartie throws her out of the car... he could easily have killed her but chose instead to safely eject her from the vehicle and just leave her behind, stranded miles from home. Also, Cromartie at one point murders another Terminator for getting in his way. Not a Terminator working for the Resistance like Cameron, but one who was going to kill one of the Humans Cromartie had been getting information from. Weird choice when he could have just asked the other Terminator for help. Nope, sneak attack backstab murdered.
My thought is that because Data is the same design as Lore he has the inbuilt capability to feel emotions. However, because Lore went crazy, Dr. Soong added a patch to Data's programing to suppress those emotions and prevent him from feeling the full range of human emotion. But the patch isn't total and sometimes emotions will get through, just nothing too strong or overwhelming. The emotion chip is designed to keep Data emotionally stable, it's an anti-insanity chip. When it's installed it fully unlocks his preexisting emotional capabilities while keeping them in check.
Doesn't Soong explicitly state the exact opposite of your theory in an actual episode though lol I mean he says I designed the emotion chip for Data to give him emotions but Lore stole it and it doesn't work for Lore because it was designed for Data, it's kind of open and shut
@@kylezo Does the chip add the hardware processing for emotions or just apply a software patch? So is it more like an EPU (emotional processing unit) or like a ROM chip (with the necessary drivers and databases).
There is a condition that I just read about called Alexithymia, a sort of "emotional color blindness" where you have emotions but can't really identify them.
I suspect having that and that's why data vibes so hard with me. (adhd and autism here) from my experience: it's like you still definitely have emotions, you just sometimes don't really realize them, until you are yelling, and like.... oh, apparently this is really pissing me off. or when I talk about traumatic shit and at some point I start shaking and realize... oh it's probably emotionally too much to me? it's not like being a fun cool robot tho, because you definitely still have emotions... not being aware of them tho makes it hard to listen to what your mental health needs, if that makes sense? but some parts of datas experience definitely vibe.
It literally means "no words for feelings" and yes. The human brain actually does some very quick logical calculations based on past experience and available information when making decisions about what to do. We call it instinct or emotion because the brain doesn't usually show its work. The amygdala, a major emotional centre of the brain, is basically a threat calculator. A human brain makes you feel fear, while a positronic brain says, "running away is the strategy most likely to mitigate this danger at this time." That's why Vulcans complaining about silly little human emotions has always rung a little false for me.
The scene in Ten Forward where Data says he hates the drink but then asks for more is easily one of my favorite Trek comedy bits. Happy Holidays Steve! ❤️
"Can someone experience emotions an not recognize them?" There is a reason Data is the poster child of people on the Autism Spectrum. As a child I honestly thought I didn't experience emotions. My evidence was that I didn't cry when watching sad movies, and didn't laugh when watching comedies. I didn't recognize my more subtle reactions as being emotional.
I went through a period of a few years when I was in a series of stage plays in a community theater. After a while, I started to think about the differences, if any, between my emotional reactions on stage, and the ones I had in real life. It made me much more conscious of my own motivations and behavior, which I think is a good thing; so in a sense I became less emotional and certainly more contemplative.
I concluded years ago that Data always experienced low key emotions .He was capable of being disturbed by an experience (Like his nightmares) and of wishing to have a creative outlet (Music ,painting and poetry ) He was able to express disappointment in himself if he felt he had fallen short in some way .If he had no feelings he would have simply analysed the fault as he understood it and avoided it next time a similar situation arose .He showed a concern for his friends that went beyond simple ethics and occasionally even expressed insecurity .Grand flights of joy or anger may have been beyond him, but he showed too many complex ,and technically unnecessary, responses to be totally devoid of emotion .
yeah, this. Soong mentioned that the real difference between Data and Lore was "programming". Also, Lore didn't actually USE the chip in the way Data later did. which raises the question: did Lore have emotions because of the chip... or because his programming worked differently?
I had assumed that Data had some kind of empathy programming as another way to counter the ‘cold murderous logic’ of Lore. That over time as he gained new experiences and deepened relationships his empathy program developed and he better echoed human emotion and reactions. It might even be something similar to the way he describes friendship. His brain becomes used to certain stimuli and he unconsciously emulates it. In the crossover episode with DS9 we learn that he has programming that only unlocks after a certain level of development and that he was designed to mimic breathing and blinking. The idea of unconscious social mimicry would make sense if your goal was to program an android who could ‘fit in’ wherever they are over time but don’t want to include emotions.
The cool thing about Data was his programming was designed to improve over time. I always figured Soong withheld the emotion chip from him because he knew he needed to develop as a being first or the emotion chip would likely just turn him into another psychopath like Lore.
Great episode. I'm in the camp that has always felt that Data didn't have HUMAN emotions, he had his OWN emotional spectrum that, as suggested, he didn't have the language to process as such because he was always comparing them to his expectations.
I think overall, Data did have emotions, but they were muted, interpreted through a lens of pure logic and lacked the context necessary to properly understand them. What the chip did was removed those limitations on him, it gave him the context needed to understand them and caused him to experience his emotions with much greater intensity. Episodes such as "The Quality of Life" further demonstrate Datas capacity for emotion as he seeks to protect the Exocomps in spite of everyone else dismissing the idea that they could be sentient.
The chip adding the database of how to identify and interpret emotions. The hardware functionality was there, but he needed the patch to make proper use of it.
I always felt like Data could not process emotions, but did actually have them. He just lacked the wiring to understand what they fully meant, or to interpret their signs in other people. Emotions can be subtle things, and their more obvious signs have many layers of nuance we only understand because we are literally built to do so. Without his emotion chip, Data is not built to process, express, or interpret emotions, but I think they are there, in a kind of understated way.
The thing is, their are kind of two things that get described by the word emotion. The more superficial sensation certain combination of brain chemicals make. And on the other hand there is the more deeper lying parts of your personality and your connections to other people. When we say data does not feel emotions before he gets the chip, I think we are talking about the first thing not the second one. I would even say this character invites us to ponder about the relationship between the two.
I think this is the only interpretation that really feels sensible to me, the idea that he'd just be fundamentally incapable of any sort of emotion ever without the chip just seems nonsensical given the fact that he's specifically made to be capable of learning and changing. I'd argue that emotions are nothing more than reflexive logic (albeit in us fleshy creatures that logic is from the perspective of evolution, not the individual), starting with the most basic "i must survive, thus anything that threatens my survival is Bad and anything that aids my survival is Good" and from there becoming more and more specific. But also that doesn't mean he understands or realizes this, just like how we don't necessarily understand our instincts or our muscle memory. He certainly seems to act on basic emotion without even realizing what he's doing, and everyone around him is so utterly used to emotions that it doesn't even register to them as unusual. There's of course also the autistic coding, and being autistic myself i can say that i sometimes have similar things (maybe the polar opposite actually?), where i experience an emotion but i don't really "feel" it as such, i just recognize that that something is unpleasant and take action to avoid it. A direct example of this sorta thing is that oftentimes when i'm near something sad i fully recognize that it's sad, but i don't *feel* sad, but other times the sadness hits like a truck and i'm sobbing for minutes on end until it runs out and i kinda just snap back to not being sad again.
I believe that Data had developed the capacity to feel emotions. To my mind, this is why he had problems with the emotion chip - he was experiencing conflicting emotions from his own feelings and from the emotion chip.
It's possible that Data felt emotions the whole time, but they were android emotions that he couldn't form context for because he's the only android and had no one else to compare them with. The times where it seems that he's developing emotions it where android emotion overlaps with human emotions. The "emotion" chip gives him human emotions which he has plenty of experience with to give context.
In college, one of my programming teachers had us break down our decision making into if-then-else statements. This exercise allowed me to see more clearly how like computers we are. With that in mind, I can see data experiencing emotion but on a more basic level. He may not feel the pain of loss but he is still experiencing emotion.
I feel (lol) that data's curiosity was a result of some kind of emotional response. So I believe he did have emotions but because all emotions are defined in organic terms he was simply unaware of his emotions, if we felt his emotions we probably wouldn't recognize it as emotions as we know them. Hell he had an attachment to Tasha because their relationship meant so much to him
I always thought the emotion chip was more of a chip that turns off the safety protocols on Data's emotions. Remember Lore had emotions minute one, its safe to say that Data did too.
I've made a similar argument in the past for "Isaac", the android character on The Orville. My opinion is that Isaac has been perfectly capable of feeling emotions, but has a strong need to *believe* that he doesn't... so, in cases where he is clearly reacting out of emotion, he makes some kind of plausible "excuse" for why his action was a logical, plausible one.. BUT, let's be honest, the Orville ended (MINOR SPOILER) ..... ...with Isaac's wedding to Claire--- and what emotionless being chooses to get married? -- during which he said, "The only occasion on which I ever made an error in judgement was 21 hours, 7 minutes, & 14 seconds after you terminated our coupling. I cannot experience emotion; however, I would prefer not to experience error."
Like Mork and Mindy when Mindy pointed out to Mork that he was displaying emotions even though he said he didn't have any I was told that living beings need emotions to survive
I think Data has emotions before receiving the chip, but not typical human emotions. In particular, the chip may just activate and simulate the physiological responses associated with emotions. Take anger, for example: in The Most Toys, Data recognizes that Fajo killing Varria is a violation of ethics, but his heartbeat probably doesn't accelerate. He experiences the cognitive -- one could say intellectual -- side of anger. On the other hand, in Descent, Part One, Lore may simply be making him feel the physical aspects that allow Data to describe his feeling as anger. Also, I think this question is valuable. In general, people need to realize that others may understand their emotions differently. Cultural, personal, and medical factors influence my experience and expression of "joy", for instance. My "joy" may be a little different from your "joy", and that's okay.
We just did an episode about "Generations" (that's sort of a Christmas movie, right?). We talked a bit about how the emotion chip should always have been a placebo instead of an actual emotion-generator.
In the time between when I watched TNG on TV as a child and rewatching it with my wife who had never seen it, I was diagnosed with severe depression. I got treatments for it, and over that and therapy started better recognizing my own emotional responses, as well as just having my brain actually “feel” them more intensely (depression to me wasn’t “sad” all the time it was “emotion and motivation not found” all the time). So when we got to TNG and Data, my wife and I immediately recognized Data in that experience. The emotions were there but were “clouded” or “dampened”. When the emotion chip showed up, my wife even referred to it as “electro-Lexapro” because he’d clearly had emotions, but this helped him regulate and express them better.
I was thinking of this myself, and how the emotions chip seemed analogous to… well anti-depressants. Its an aid that let data feel fully rather than the muted existence beforehand.
i always felt the chip either allowed him to understand them, or because he was active for so long he developed them naturally as his program expanded and he just didn't understand them
My counterargument to the whole "Data instantly recognises human emotions as different from his default internal state" thing is that Data emotions _are_ different from human emotions, but also they're stronger because they're all artificially generated. Additionally, he's been focusing on understanding human emotions since shortly after he was activated, while he may not understand humour, he can, at least, recognise what laugher and anger look like and could then make the connection to what that feels like when he does feel them. As mentioned earlier in the video, he'd never even given a thought to trying to understand what Data emotions are like because he didn't realise they were a thing. Data having different kinds of emotions is no different than pets or other animals having different kinds of emotions. We know when our dog is happy, depressed, excited, iritated, angry, amorous, or tired, but that's about it, their emotional range is much smaller than that of most people, and their experiences of those emotions are clearly different from how we experience them. Because he's a truly artificial intelligence (rather than a copy of a biological intelligence) Data's emotions are drastically different from human emotions, though they can manifest in ways we can interpret through a human emotional lens. Because Data's emotions are evolving out of the way his neural net is developing, it makes sense that they would start out very weak and get stronger over time similar to how neural nets in current, deep learning AI develop routes through the net which activate more and more strongly when given multiple similar inputs. And, finally, since Data wasn't actually paying attention to his emotions, that would stunt their development. Personally, I think the emotion chip did him a _massive_ disservice since it meant it permanently stunted the continued development of his own emotions in favour of human emotions.
Personally, I think that Data did experience emotions all along - they were just severely muted compared to what most people experience. The emotion chip didn't create emotions out of whole cloth, it simply enhanced what was already there - to the point where they were overwhelming to Data when he first experienced them.
I don't even know if the chip 'enhanced' them so much as 'plugged them in to his body.' There's a huge difference between understanding that you hate someone and getting that blood-boiling rage tearing through your body. I personally think THAT'S what the emotion chip added, allowing Data to feel the actual feedback of his emotions instead of just having to logic based on them.
I always thought emotions were in there somewhere. Watch when Pulaski relented to the correct pronunciation to his name, and tell me he didn't feel something in even a limited capacity. The firmware was there, it just needed update to run it. Years ago, Game Boy enhanced cartridges came out. In your handheld, it was 4 but grayscale, but in SNES adapter, magically 8 bit color.
Hi Steve, Since Jessie Gender has gotten pretty close with the cast and creators of Lower Decks, I feel like her getting a guest spot in the show might be in the cards. If she got you the opportunity to do a cameo or play a secondary character alongside her, would you do it? I am picturing you as a grumpy Tellarite who feels the same way about the crew of the Cerritos and their adventures as you do about Lower Decks. Could be fun and meta!
I think data always had the neural pathways necessary for the emotions ,the only thing the chip did was give the input something to be decoded by. He can act on feelings as he does have them and he can interpret them in a limited way, but the chip is what takes those input feelings, fleshes them out and unpacks them into full emotions letting him know what he's feeling. Lore didn't just send Data emotions in "the Descent" but the definitions as to what those feeling were as well.
the way I always figured it, is that like, how could Data know he ~wasn't~ feeling emotions? Like ther's literally no way to tell without being able to switch consciousness with someone. I think he was just told he has no emotions and assumed it was true
I have always thought that Data had Proto-emotions, either given to him by Soong, or developed along the way. Not true full on emotions obviously, but subtle giving him the curiosity, and loyalty, but not to the level of obsession or single minded devotion. They would not over ride his logical thought process, but may provide context for some of his decisions.
I always read Data’s pre-chip “emotions” as programmed mimicry or display of reactions that observers would expect. His algorithms produced behavior that humanoids would find familiar and comforting, that they would read as emotion, but **internally** he felt none.
In Descent part 2, when Geordi is trying to talk Data out of what he’s doing to him, Data hesitates and has a moment of conscience even though he’s only been fed anger and hate by Lore. So it seems he does have the ability to experience another emotion on his own. He can’t identify it but it’s enough to make him stop what he’s doing to Geordi and re-examine.
I suspect Data has always had the emotions, but lacked the ability to understand or interpret them as such. Emotions are complicated, and Noonian Soong may have been able to integrate the raw emotions without the higher levels of awareness, and self control required to regulate emotions. This could imply that Data would develop complete emotions over time as his positronic brain developed and learned to understand what he was feeling. However, while on the long road of discovering emotions, the hidden emotions were always present, and often presented when the strongest of them were experienced, brought on by loss, anger and perhaps even hatred and disgust.
In my mind, he developed emotions, like he developed a personality and sentience. He just can't express it the same way, but the fact that he has friends, hobbies and instincts, show that he's outgrown his original programming.
I've always believed that Data has something that amounts to emotions without being emotions, in the same way that you can create art of an object by shading the area around where the object isn't. He may not be able to feel in the way we would, but he still cares and loves. It's similar to how someone with low affect can still live a fulfilling life, if they choose to. And then the emotion chip gives Data the actual feelings.
Also in "Most toys", why would Data put on, the clothes Kivas gave him, after burning his uniform, if Data is just an android without emotions and feelings. Shouldn't it be completely irrelevant to him whether he wears clothes or not, especially if someone forces him to (or that is part of so called ethical program in Data)? Or even , why Data should resist to Bruce Madoxx experiment on him in Measure of Man episode. Is that instinct or emotion? I personally think that Picard, and especially Spock, most of the time doesn't show much more, feelings and emotions than Data. Great video, thanks.
Data wears clothes because when he was first activated, he saw no logical need for them (being an Android) so Soong and Juliana had to program with a modesty subroutine in order to get him to stay dressed, because he was, after all, "anatomically correct". XD
The very last interaction between Data and KF tells me that he may have lingering trauma about the incident. Just as Data turns to walk out, KF snaps his fingers. Data pauses for a moment. I haven't gone looking but I'll bet he has a response of some kind to the snapping of fingers after that.
WRT Measure of a Man, Data has a sense of self-preservation. Whether it's a pre-programmed thing or something he developed, it's there. He even says in the episode, "I am the culmination of one man's dream. This is not ego or vanity, but when Doctor Soong created me he added to the substance of the universe. If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique, something wonderful will be lost. I cannot permit that. I must protect his dream." He knows that he has to preserve himself.
Not sure if someone already mentioned this, and I've not seen the episode in a while so I can't be certain, but if Fajo still had his proximity forcefield working, then Data would not have been able to apprehend him by hand. He had to do it from a distance, and the only weapon available was the disruptor. Fajo threatened to keep murdering people until Data complied, so that rather limits his choices
I thought about this. Data could have held everyone at gunpoint indefinitely, trying to get more to turn on Fajo. I think he had time, he didn't know he was getting beamed out. No one was getting murdered at that moment so killing Fajo right then did not make logical sense - I call emotions, which confused him leading him to then mislead Riker about what he had done - also from an emotional place. Data could have said "I believed that the crew was in mortal danger, so I fired" and everyone would have understood, but he didn't. maybe because he felt some shame over feeling and reacting to rage
As someone who is both "on the spectrum" and has chronic depression, It seems to me that Data might have had emotions, but they were muted. I feel all sorts of emotions, but I don't often get really furious or joyous or excited. Did you know you can have an anxiety attack without perceiving an emotional sense of anxiety or panic? I can get short of breath, pins and needles in my extremities, and a pounding heart, and still feel emotionally calm, or at most annoyed at the physical sensations. Maybe Data was the same way. The emotion chip merely amplified his emotions so that he could laugh or panic or rage. Without it his feelings were very subdued but present.
Now it's been a while since I watched the episodes that were about Data's emotions but what stood out to me was the chip was referred to as giving Data basic emotions which kind of implies the existence of higher emotions which seems to be something Data does have. Sure something like a connection to a friend or former lover may not be as flashy as anger or satisfaction but I'd argue that it still counts as an emotion. And it goes a long way towards explaining how Data can seem to be reacting emotionally even though he shouldn't be able to
I feel like Data was building emotions. Through study and emulation they were becoming part of his programming. The emotion chip was just a shortcut. Q letting him laugh, might have also helped to jumpstart the process. I could see that without the emotion chip Data would naturally start to feel a wide range of emotions in the coming years.
One aspect not included in the analysis of the text are the examples where Data shows emotion because he is under someone else's control. Think of Ira Graves or Power Play. Those could indicate that his hardware is fully capable of emotion when running different "software". That's exactly what Soong said in Brothers. In that light I believe the emotion chip wasn't hardware but updated software, like a BIOS patch on a thumb drive.
Obviously bringing my own personal experience to it, but I've always read Data as a being that has limited emotions and only knows how to describe those emotions in non-emotional terms, until the emotion chip connects him freely to "full" emotional experience, and he learns to integrate that into his life experience. This reading arises from multiple episodes where we see Data struggling to deal with certain experiences, and even describing mechanically how his positronic brain experiences friendship. Being able to mechanically describe things like dopamine reception in our own brains doesn't make them not emotional experiences, it just demonstrates physical understanding of the mechanism. Consider also that Data makes various choices throughout the series that are very incongruous if we take the show's word about things like Data's morality processing. WITHOUT being influenced by Lore, or having his dreams activated, or whatever. Are there moral and ethical codes that line up with Data discharging that disruptor? Yes. Do those codes line up to what we are told was programmed into Data? No. Looked at a different way, imagine if Data were an alien species that hadn't gone through adult metamorphosis (so, like, second puberty, or something) yet, and then the emotion chip plotline of the movie he instead undergoes that biological process and develops full emotional experience. Or remove most of the layers of sci-fi metaphor, and make him a human character whose brain is hardwired differently...do we have words for that? I feel like we have words for that...and then the emotion chip arc is them experimenting with something like, I dunno, advanced electrical currents to activate certain neural connections with only one layer of "this newly discovered alien grub" techno babble layered on top. I don't mean to present this as a definitive reading, only a very applicable one to consider. Especially considering what everyone now knows thanks to hindsight about Data as neuro-divergent representation.
honestly, it feels a bit distateful from the part of the writers presenting Data has not having human emotions, when so much people with depression or psychosis have difficulties connecting with their emotions
Mine was his programming always had the ability to learn and adapt. He learnt basic concepts of emotion and expressed in the only way he's program could.
Great video. Very interesting and well put. At some point during TNG, Data made a leap of faith (I believe that was the title of this specific episode) that he could become more than his program. I think that prior to getting the emotion chip, he did just that. Plus, the word ‘EMOTION’ seems to cover a wide range of different feelings. Maybe he was capable to feel some of them, while other were out of his reach until he got the chip. When you consider things this way, doesn’t it mean that compassion is a more basic human feeling than pleasure? There is hope in thinking so. Happy holidays. 🎉
I believed Data had emergent emotions. It's not unreasonable to think a self-aware being with that much complexity might form something we would label emotions. He clearly cared about Geordie and Tasha.
Spiner is a wonderful actor. The spot at 16:37 is a shot of Data, his face a mask of hatred, anger and disgust all at once. 3 emotions, displayed with just his face. well done.
I always thought Data had very limited access to emotions so he could deal better with all the bigoted teasing than Lore when he was essentially newborn. And whatever limited his access continued to work even after downloading his daughter, Lall’s programming. Once he did that, he acquired her ability to feel things strongly unless checked by something. Therefore the emotion chip simply turned off whatever was dampening his access as did unusually strong emotions.
How did you get through this without touching on Data's relationship with Tasha? He surely couldn't have had that relationship without some capability for emotion.
For what it's worth, it's called Alexithymia. It's a decently common personality trait where one simply can't really notice, identify, or describe their own emotions. Around ten percent of the population has it. It's sometimes called "Tin-man syndrome". I, personally, am a very empathic and sympathetic person... who has a lot of issues recognizing my own emotions or even that I'm feeling anything at all. I also suffer from(as it were) anhedonia, and when I manage to treat it, I can in fact get into renditions of the "This is awful, I loathe it." "More?" "Yes please!" and "Precious Little Life Form" bits without meaning to. So, I always read Data as having the same sort of flattened emotions and inability to recognize them as I do.
My feeling is that Data had emotions that developed as an emergent property of his development, but he never really recognized them for what they were. The emotion chip just gave him an imitation of the human experience of emotions.
I always thought that Data had muted emotions, but he, for the most part, wasn't able to recognize them for what they truly were. There is a very brief instant where we saw Data look truly pissed off, and Fajo knew, on a fundamental level, that he was a dead man. For all of her faults Dr. Pulaski began to recognize his emotions and even defended them against his other friends. At the end of the 2nd season I saw her as being one of Data's biggest supporters. I'm sorry that we never got to see her again. I think that she would have cried enough for them both after Data lost Lal. I think that she would have also become fast friends with Data's mother. Someone else that we should have seen more.
I always felt that through most of TNG they tried to subtly imply that Data had emotions but didn't recognize them as such. They definitely abandon this going into Descent and Generations. But I kind of preferred the earlier implication versus what we ended up getting. It was like Data was slowly finding emotions, which would have been a much more compelling character arc than him simply being gifted them all at once. One of my favorite "Data might have emotions" moments was in Data's Day. In his voice over log to Commander Maddox, he states "Since Vulcans are incapable of lying, I must accept the Ambassador's explanation as the truth, but I would still prefer a 'gut feeling' to back up this conclusion." The brilliant irony there being that Data does suspect something about the Ambassador, so he does have a gut feeling that is telling him that something isn't right. He just doesn't realize that it is a gut feeling.
The way I've always thought of it is that emotions aren't only thoughts or feelings. They're a complex combination of both. Data had and further developed the mental underworking of a full set of emotions, but he couldn't actually feel them physically like we do. So sometimes he would react in a way that seemed emotional because his thoughts fully lined up with what would accompany that emotion. I also think this is why Soong didn't give him emotions right away, he gave them to lore before lore was ready and they overwhelmed him, he gave data time to learn and grow into his own person before allowing him to feel the emotions even though he had already programmed in the logical underpinnings that would drive the emotions.
Hello Steve Shives and fans, I have always had a different theory to this question, does Data have Emotions. My theory is that the Emotion Chip can be better described as an Emotion Processor. Data's positronic brain was designed to adapt and evolve through experience and time, allowing Data to unlock new abilities, like dreaming. Data's positronic brain was designed to develop emotions slowly through experiences like an organic brain does but couldn't fully process them the same way until the Emotion Chip was emplaced. Compared to Lore. Lore's emotions were fully activated driving him insane but when Lore got the Emotion Chip making him more controlled.
Data obviously had emotions, they were so apparent that the crew members even perceived him as having feelings, even though he kept insisting that he didn’t have them. The problem wasn’t him not having emotions, it’s just that the emotions that he did feel he didn’t understand how they correlated to how other people expressed them and his were much more subdued in comparison to other peoples. He even admitted at one point that he was capable of missing people, which is an emotion, he just didn’t understand it as such
This is a general other way the topic might have been addressed - through the reaction of others. Example: Dr. Crusher, in "The Offspring" says she finds it hard to believe that Data is incapable of giving Lal love. I think the ending makes a case that she was right to think that way. The reaction of Admiral Haftel to what Data did to the systems failure of Lal is of a person reacting to the profound emotion of another, not just his own.
this is pretty much exactly the video i would have commissioned. my thoughts were that Data is always depicted as being curious. i imagine most people don't consider curiosity an emotion, but i think it can be defined as a desire for knowledge, and desire IS an emotion.
Even though, when I got older, Picard was creeping up to challange his spot (not the cat), Data has been and still is my favourite character on TNG. Thanks for a, as per usual, very insightful video.
I think we're making the question too binary. I'd posit that Data didn't start with emotions, but was slowly developing them. Given a couple hundred years of personal growth, I believe he would have developed a full range of emotions on his own. The chip was a cheat code or short cut that I never felt meshed well with the narrative of Data's quest for his own humanity. Joining Starfleet, playing poker, getting a cat, exploring music, painting, and the theater, engaging in friendships....all of that was thrown out when they brought in the chip.
I feel that a lot of this can be explained by the fact that Data *wants* to be human and have emotions. He could be acting in a way that simulates emotions. "What would a human who experiences anger or compassion do in this situation?"
Steve. I'm sorry if this isn't the place to say so..... but I just wanted to let you know how much joy and happiness you bring into my life. I regret not saying so sooner, but I HAD to tell you how much you're appreciated! I love ALL your vids... I enjoy so much the member perks and getting to hang out with ya. it's like looking up to a senior when you're a freshman. I just admire you, agree with you, and think you're funny as hell. it was overdue that I said so.
As someone who has much computer experience. It is many times easier to block off access to certain parts of a program than to re-write the whole thing. In essence what I'm saying is the Data's father simply blocked the emotion programming that was already present. He said the were only minor differences in programming, between him and Lore. The chip was simply a dongle to allow access to those functions already in his system. What little emotions Data felt or expressed were simply leakage between those functions and the rest of his human emulation programming.
To the point about it being Data making assumptions... I seem to recall an episode where the crew is dealing with some Vulcan bigwig and Data states in his log that even though all evidence looks above board, he still had misgivings. He goes on to state that since he is incapable of having hunches he will dismiss his misgivings. Data... buddy... that *was* a hunch. You just had a hunch.
The emotion chip was the equivalent of Dumbo's feather. Data had emotions but did not know and could not recognize he had emotions and did not believe he could get emotions except for outside instances where he believed he could get emotions.
Great thought piece here. I wanted to check to see who wrote the episode the Most Toys. Her name is Shari Goodhartz. She was also a writer in two of the darkest TNG episodes Night Terrors and Violations. Interesting these episodes also have as their primary theme emotions. It’s interesting that the most human Data becomes is with a writer that is not usually part of the writers room. This does not negate her work in any way or makes it any less canon. Nonetheless it doesn’t appear to be something that the writers room explored so richly ever again.
It has been suggested that our emotion is integral to our ability to take initiative. The fact that Data has always been able to take initiative and has always been portrayed as expressing bemusement or a certain degree of pleasure with interactions with other beings (thinking Bashir describing Data as "personable") or affection for the memory of Tasha makes me think that Data has always had subtle emotions, but it took the emotion chip for him to be able to feel more intense emotions like the anger and aggression seen in Descent or pretty much the full range of emotions in Generations after the chip is installed.
I always read this as Data had emotions but lacked full awareness of them, so they'd manifest kind of like how people with a severed corpus callosum can't say they see things in their left visual field, the part of their brain that has the power of speech literally can't even though a part of them definitely does see it. Data can't directly process the emotions it felt like, and the emotion chip connected him to them consciously. I got the vibe that sometimes Data didn't know why he would do certain things because he wasn't aware of the emotions below the surface.
I always felt that there was a massive missed opportunity to explore the idea of data as a “culture of one” as Picard called it vis a vis him having feelings. I’m convinced he does. They’re just not human feelings. He feels as an android would, and yet he’s tragically convinced that humans are some sort of emotional gold standard. Consider when Lal tells him she loves him, and he says “I wish I could.” That is *not* something a being without feeling would say. He has loyalties, friendships, even sentimentality as displayed in “Measure of a Man” when he can’t come up with a reason for keeping his medals beyond just wanting them. Or when he talks about how he “misses” people when they’re gone after his programming has adjusted to their presence. It’s not that he lacked emotions. It’s that he spent the whole series convinced that human emotions are the only way to feel rather than accepting himself and his way of experiencing the world around him as equally valid and worth exploring to their fullest.
I always believed that Data HAD emotions but his programming only allowed him to process it from a purely analytical concept. His chip was like a software update to translate those feeling to another level. And that Data needed to become mature enough to handle those emotions otherwise he would have been just like his brother. I think he was similar to the tin man/lion/scarecrow in that he already had in him the qualities that he was seeking. It was the journey (not the chip) that prepared him to have emotions
The first time I started to question if Data did experience emotion without the ability to truly understand to express all along was part 2 of "Redemption." He's dealing with a prejudice first officer all episode and after being questioned one too many times during a time-critical situation he snaps "Mr. Hobson! You will carry out my orders or I will relieve you of duty!" There is an argument to be made that Data was just emulating what he'd seen his superiors do in the past, but it seemed genuine to me. I was about 13 or 14 the first time I saw that episode and we just learning to read beyond the surface layer a narrative presents. You could say Star Trek and Data helped me understand the concept of subtext.
I think Data was always capable of feeling emotions, but there was something Soong put in him that severely inhibits it. The Emotion Chip is really a partial disabler of this programming. If you've noticed in other android based Star Trek episodes, other androids were capable of feeling emotions, but it caused malfunctions to happen. You can see it in Lal as well as TOS's Mr. Norman and his other android brethren.
"Being a robot's great, but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad."
- spoken by Bender but exhibited regularly by Data
Ah, Bender. What a genius creation he was.
"But I don't have emotions" Data said, REGRETTABLY.
@@EddieDalmunda haha, reminds me of how Terminators have always been shown to have some semblance of emotion. It's a weird concept, but it's there. They weren't designed to have emotions. But they do... in a way. "this is not the outcome desired... and I don't like that." sort of thing.
damn you beat me to it lol
@@jsalsmanChatGPT is a word processor. Not comparable to even an android like Data or a robot like Bender.
I think Data's relationship with Spot is the best case for him having emotions pre-emotion chip.
There's a lot of neurodivergent reading of Data, and there is a book that posits that cats are autistic (cats and humans on the autistic spectrum display very similar behaviour).
Data also created a massive menu for Spot to eat.
Another good point
Only cat-typical cats are autistic.
Its a startling difference when you have one of each. ( especially a large breed like Maine Coon or Norwegian Forrest Cat . they are chill & more social but the flip side is they expect interaction and the cost of them listening to you, giving you neurotypical attention is expecting to be listened to when they want to )
At "he is a good cat. He is a pretty cat." lol!
I'm thinking 🤔 the episode scene where data ask worf to take Care of spot.
Worf "I Will feed him"
For me one of the biggest indicators Data does have some type of emotion is the final exchange between Data and Soong himself in ‘Brothers.’
Data says “You know I cannot grieve for you, sir.”
And Soong replies - “You will, in your own way.”
To me this implies that Data does experience emotion, just in a very different and unique manner. The emotion chip just makes those feelings more overt and palatable to human expectations.
For a robot or an alien, emotions may be stunningly and intricately more diverse than we would ordinarily think, to the point in which they may be difficult to even recognize or appreciate, and that doesn’t make one better than the other - it just makes them different.
From a scientific perspective. Biological beings experienced evolutionary advantageous chemical simulations to certain situations. Given Soong's insistence to make androids passable as humanity, personality albeit not programmed in any individual (artificial or not) will naturally manifest approximations by proxy of appropriated social situations seemed advantageous. We generally regard emotion separate to personality however which gives the rather mundane answer unlock to Data of less controllable approximated subconscious expressions
Honestly, that's my read too. Data has emotions. They just aren't like neurotypical human emotions. As an autistic person, Data's emotional spectrum often feels similar to mine - difficult to pinpoint and express in ways recognisable to neurotypical people. I do struggle to recognise my emotions and even if I'm having one if it's not a passionate or intense emotion.
@@majuuorthrus3340 This. Even if it's just a failure of the writers as emotional human beings, a lot of Data's behaviour seems to be dictated by some kind of "emotion", his most overt emotion being curiosity.
My take was that Data actually was slowly developing emotions on his own. So slowly that Data himself didn't even realize it. The emotion chip was basically a cheat code to get him to the end result, but he probably would've gotten there on his own in about forty or fifty years or so.
I agree with this take, it almost feels like he.. gaslit himself into feeling emotion?
Perhaps in his noted wish to be human he slowly observed and took in the emotional behaviors of his crewmates and attempted to emulate those actions and thoughts when applicable.
@@KujouCh I kind of assume he's had the emotions all along, he wouldnt even be able to long for emotions without an emotional drive, but what he lacks is the ability to perceive them because he tricked himself into not looking for them
If anything, the emotion chip just gave him a main hub where he can process it, before that he slowly learned around his neural net, now the chip streamlines how its processed.
@@Elliasal Like a flashdrive with the software database on how to read emotions. But over time he sort of subconsciously populated his own database.
I always felt that there might of been a chance that Data had some level of emotional capacity all along but it was one that simply doesn't translate to an organic understanding of emotion.
This is what I favour: he has non-logical preferences, which are "emotions" and are valid but not easily recognised by the organics (nearly all humans) around him.
Through observation, Data could certainly emulate emotions, or begin to understand what will cause emotional responses in others, especially those he knows well (so manipulation Picard becomes a possibility). Given that Data's positronic brain has the ability to work with the cheap means the capacity for emotions must exist- even if he cannot normally express them without updating his drivers or whatever. I feel he experienced "proto-emotions" from time to time, but rarely enough that he could still say in a given moment that he was incapable of feeling them. Not bad for a brain that is merely twice as powerful as the most advanced computer we have today!
@@PositionLight yeah, it's liek the terminator analogy. Terminators have very complex decision-making behaviors... that often make NO sense to Humans. Why? Because the machines have an utterly alien concept of emotion. It's most easily visible when they get angry. But it comes up in more ways than that.
I figured it is almost a necessary part of sentience, emotion is often used just to allow rapid decision making so to have preferences and such would already beget a rudimentary form, and Data shows capacity a good bit beyond that. Now, it might be that he wants a fuller range, and that is perfectly reasonable, but he definitely has SOME
@@jamesgasik3424 I think the strongest evidence of his emotions is the episode with his daughter Laal. Although he says he cannot feel love for her, he does in his way. At the end of the episode he transfers her memories to his and talks about how she so enriched his life. There is some sort of feeling there
I’m actually really surprised that you didn’t bring up Data‘s dedication to his daughter, Lal. If you want to think like a computer, the logical thing to do would’ve been to just deactivate a defective piece of hardware. But, Data worked feverishly to try to repair the malfunction. In addition, he was there with her to say goodbye as she slipped away to nothingness. On top of all that, rather than just eliminating the programs, he transferred them over to his own positronic brain.
I’m sure there are ways to work around that, but for my money as a father, that is Data having emotions towards his offspring.
I was thinking the same thing ... Data showed a lot of emotion with Lal ... when Commander Riker was flirting with Lal in 10Forward and his efforts to save Lal. To me, him having no emotions would have caused him to deactivate her before the system failure, but he actively tried to save her. At some level, he had some type of emotions.
He also has been showing some level of care and compassion in the fact that he has his own pet cat that he voluntarily took on. A pet that, despite a public image that would indicate otherwise, both needs and exhibits a fondness and preference toward his owner.
There was also Data's interactions with Spot in so many episodes. His concern that Warf would feed, water and nit leave her alone too much, his irritation when he was trying to get her to "follow his commands" and she kept jumping up on his console while he was on the computer, his concern for Spot's kittens when she disappeared, and so many more. there were subtle hints all through the series, even his concern for Lore.
@@jacklow9611 I think that Data does have emotions but he cannot feel or express them as intensely as his brother, Lore. This was likely intentional on Dr. Soong's part so that Data doesn't lash out at people in a fit of temper over a perceived offense or allow his emotions to overpower his good judgment. But throughout the series, we can clearly see that Data can enjoy things, be fascinated by things, show concern and bond with people and animals, even show annoyance when people mispronounce his name, and even anger when his subordinates are unwilling to obey his orders.
Not to mention some key dialogue between Crusher and Data, when Data approaches her for parenting advice, and Crusher tells him of the importance of giving children love and attention, and Data says,
"I can give her all the attention (paraphrased) but I cannot give her love."
"Now why do I have a hard time believing that?"
Or the moment that Data opens his mouth to respond to Lal's proclamation of love as she is dying, before uttering that he cannot share in the feeling with her. Who wants to bet he was on the verge of saying it back to her?
I will never forgive the writers and producers of TNG for killing off Lal; she had so much character potential, both for herself and for Data, and she wouldn't even have to be a huge character, either; she could have appeared in one to three episodes per season, allowing the producers to work around Hallie Todd's schedule with any other projects she was involved in.
I have an anecdote that might be a good analogy for Data's emotions:
A couple of months back, I got a new smart TV, but it couldn't connect to the wi-fi router because there was a patch that needed to be downloaded first, which I initially wasn't told about. However, the TV was somehow able to piggy-back off the printer and use it as a router to connect to the actual router to the internet. I didn't push any buttons: the TV figured that out on its own and added the printer as a network for streaming. However, this streaming was slow and choppy, and I continued to look up how to fix the problem so that I could get REAL streaming. Once I got a USB drive with the appropriate software and plugged it into the TV, the networks updated, and the TV started working just as it should be... although every once in a while it still tries to piggy-back off the printer.
I think the hardware for emotions was always there for Data, but lacked the appropriate drivers to appropriately use them: like a Smart TV that can't connect to a router, but knows it should connect to SOMETHING, and chooses a printer instead.
oooh, Yeah, it's like how Soong told Data that it's PROGRAMMING that makes the difference between him and Lore.
That's actually quite an amazing little true story. I like it.
This works really bloody well as an analogy.
That is what I was thinking along the lines of too. It’s not like you either have emotions or don’t, there are a lot of them out there. It’s obvious Data has some emotions, he just lack the ability to process them properly without his chip.
I am now emotionally invested in your tv lol
Data had emotions. They were just subtle. What Lore did to him was beam an overdose of emotion at him.
I always said he had emotions but he lacked "passion" both good and bad.
Thats called "valence" . Its built into most of our senses.
My interpretation is that Data can’t FEEL emotions as physical sensations until the chip but that he has some intellectual/analytical approximation of emotional motivation and understanding the entire time. Throughout the series he expresses desires, curiosities, concern for the well being of others, etc. While not justifying his motivation with an appeal to feelings, there does seem to be something at the very least adjacent to emotion there.
yeah he just doesn’t feel anything in his gut basically. to him, fear means “i’m in danger” instead of “i feel sick to my stomach and i can barely think.” once he has the emotion chip, fear can totally overwhelm him.
I think thats true. He's also missing emotional valence towards most sensations.
But i think he does possess some emotion but its mostly in a monoband of fascination- curiosity. This is akin to sepia. Its definitely a color. But as its neither black & white nor has any valence or contrasting emotions , and is subtle, he lacks an ability to perceive it as an emotion. If you saw everything in one color you could never explain to someone else you see a color, nor know you do. In humans our emotions themselves can produce emotional responses & we ( sometimes ) are aware of both even at the same time. Data lacks this self awareness without the chip. It might have been on purpose to prevent emotional psychsocial conflicts in his early development. His daughter was capable and it may have backfired. Lore was a giant mess. But his "mother" Android was ok, and it may have been because She already developed ( Soong could ve wiped her memory of her growing up once she developed and programmed her as his wife . just as he did with Data )
It is like an emotional accelerator unit.
Yeah, even if he had emotions before, it’s clear the chip changed how they manifested.
He has all the cognitive aspects of emotion that a mere machine wouldn't, wanting company sometimes and preferring the company of certain people to others, doing stuff that interested him, wanting to be helpful and to have a sense of purpose, a sense of self preservation and the need to decide his own fate; But not the physical sensations that accompany these wants and needs, the jolt of fear, the euphoria of love, the lethargy of sadness etc... which would require having an endocrine system and receptors in the brain that give us the responses to its chemicals that we think of as our emotions.
Side note about the Collector - he's lucky it wasn't Lore in his collection, or Lore would have DESTROYED EVERYTHING in petty revenge.
Data could have simply told him "I am not the only android. I have a brother, so to complete your collection you would have to aquire him as well" Data Lore team up!
Lore would've taken the ship inside of ten minutes.
Omg, Lore would have a field day with that distuptor. Would have made Fajo look like a saint.
Data trolled that guy more than it would seem apparent. Maybe Data is just trolling everyone because he's just one cool mo fo.
I’d love to see that tbh
The Most Toys is one of the best episodes of TNG! There is ironically a lot of emotion in it.
Data thinks, wrestles with his conscience, decides to murder Fajo and then lies about it afterwards is a great sequence, but I really like the little bit where he sits in the chair and complies to save a life.
He shows such compassion and sympathy in that episode as well as defiance.
Less murder and more execute a murderer, in order to put an end to his threat to everyone else.
I always took it that when he says that to Riker... the way he says it and the look he gives Riker (and the understanding look that Riker gives back) he's saying without saying "yeah, I figured I had no choice" and Riker's like "it's cool, buddy, I've been there."
@@shadizersilverhand2113
Nope! Still murder! A unilateral decision to end someone's life? He wasn't protecting anyone else or himself, just killing to get rid of a bad person.
Like Dexter 😁
@@sarahscott5305 nope, not murder. Of course he'd have been protecting himself and others. Left alive he'd someday if able to escape custody he'd be back looking to recreate his collection including Data and as an obvious sociopath who casually horribly murdered someone right before Data's eyes surely has murdered other people to get his way. Execution is what he deserved.
@@davidpickens8800 OMG will you met the nice Dr Helen Noel?
You didn't mention the best example. In the episode the Next Phase, they believe that Gordi was dead. Data is worried about how to do the funeral and basically calls Gordi his best friend. In the shuttle he makes it very clear that he will miss him. If he didn't have emotions he would care that Gordi was presumed dead or how to grieve basically. He has emotions, he just doesn't express it in the way that "humans" do, nor is he aware of them due to be told they don't exist.
There is an argument to be made that his expression is a logical behavior to better integrate and work with the crew. The definition of emotion is hard enough to sift through. We've been trying for 60,000+ years to define what emotions actually are.
Logically is is beneficial to express the behavior of grief at the loss of someone simply to improve the function of others by showing a series of actions that look like grief to benefit the others whom are also grieving. It is beneficial in a social organization to share in responses.
Logically the execution in turn could be just a simple function of assessing what the emotional response of the survivors and that killing him is the optimal solution. When transported, Data simply reassessed the consequences and calculated that the execution wasn't optimal, the omission of the attack was the better response. The confrontation at the cell may seem like gloating, or simply Data assessing if the threat is in fact neutralized to a sufficient capacity.
The question of Data having emotions is no different then asking if a complete psychopath has emotions. They can express things that look like emotions, but are they genuine or simple emulations of a sincere emotional response.
Any complex system may exhibit 'emotions' but they could be just a projection of human emotions to something that doesn't actually have emotions ("That storm sounds angry"). Data clearly on too many occasions show clear examples of behaviors that look like emotions, but in reality the only one that could answer that is Data himself since we still can't answer it for ourselves, I doubt Data could either.
On the other hand... who's to say if the storm is, in fact, angry? Only the storm could answer that. What is anger but a response to specific inputs? I slap you, you get angry, raise the humidity and the storm gets angry. Is it any less or more anger?
Data may have used the term "miss" but "miss" to an android/robot/computer is not an emotion as it is with humans. There is a circuit known as a missed-pulse detector. It isn't displaying an emotion either.
I tend to be of the opinion that before the installation of the emotion chip, Data did have some basic very unsophisticated emotions. Not deliberately programmed into him, but more a simple byproduct of him having an ethical program.
For example, his decision to kill Fajo isn’t the product of a burning sense of vengeance, but rather his ethical program reaching the conclusion that it’s the surest way to stop Fajo killing anyone else, which is sort of why we emotional humans do instinctively seek vengeance; to stop a wrongdoer from doing further wrong.
So a very basic stem perhaps of the emotion, but one that can’t really come fully into bloom without the emotion chip.
His ethical subrotines is actually what makes him function so well in society. Everyone is all about Asimov's laws of robotics, but forget what Asimov tried to say with them: That they don't work. We can't just tell a robot what they can and can't do. We have to program them with a huge set of databases and algorithms to decide what is right and wrong.
If I order my robot to make me tea, the robot will go and make tea. But what if there is a baby in the way, lying on the ground? The robot would just walk through it.
Okay, lets put a big off switch on the robot, so that I can jump in and stop it. But if I do that the robot can't follow my order and make tea. So it will prevent me from turning it off.
Okay, lets put the off switch higher than following orders. What happens? I tell the robot to make tea, and the robot turns itself off, because that is better than following orders.
What if I prevent the robot from interacting with the off switch? The next generation won't have that switch, because robots can't interact with it and can't put the switch on other robots.
What if I simply program in that stepping on babies is bad. Which directive is more important, following my orders or avoiding babies? Would the robot just stand there and wait for me to remove the baby?
but if I program the robot with ethical and moral code and the ability to problem solve by itself, it would come up with something that gives me my tea and keeps the baby safe. Like going around it, or picking it up and carefully putting it aside.
Another example. Let's say there is a bad guy in a plane (or spaceship or whatever), and he intends to fly the plane/spaceship into a group of people. There is also a robot on board that follows the laws of robotics.
The robot has to protect itself, follow orders, and avoid harming people or letting them come to harm by inactivity,. In increasing priority.
The robot can't use force to get the baddie out of the cockpit, because he could be harmed. So robot wants to go into the cockpit to take over the plane and prevent the bad guy from doing his plan, saving all the people.
But the bad guy orders the robot to stay out of the cockpit and not interfere with the plan.
Now the robot has an issue. It has to save the people, because not doing anything would cause harm. It can't enter the cockpit, because that would go against orders and might require harming the baddie. it can't manually control the plane because again, against orders.
A robot with ethical code would analyse the situation and come to the conclusion that lightly injuring one bad guy would be morally better than being passive or leaving. So the robot goes into the cockpit, subdues the baddie, makes contact with ATC and lands the plane at the next airport. Saving not only his own existence and the targeted people, but the bad guy as well.
What does that have to do with Data?
He has moral and ethical code that moves him towards doing the "right" thing. There is one episode where something bad happens and the entire ship is moved away and everyone's memory of the event is wiped. Only Data knows what happens, and he won't tell. Even when ordered to do so. So the crew wants to go there again to figure out what happened. In the end they had made contact with very aggressive aliens that usually kill everyone that comes to them, and the crew has decided that wiping their memories would mean nobody has to die and the aliens accepted.
Data prefers staying quiet and not following an order by his superiors, because it is the right thing.
I always saw Data as someone who has emotions, but is unable to communicate them, even to himself. There are no words do describe how Data feels, so he concludes that he does not feel.
He could probably put his unique emotional range into words, but why would he bother? He was taught from "birth" that he has no emotion; ergo, he won't bother to contextualize his sensations as emotions. Then he gets the chip, expecting to feel intense emotion; so he's more willing to describe himself in emotional terms. The chip itself could be a placebo and still mean the world to him for this reason.
So Data has alexithymia.
@@evapadilla8342 Pretty much.
Being mildly alexithymic myself, as part of a whole heap of other neurodivergence, I find it particularly amusing that my family had nicknamed me Data as a teen, back when TNG was first running.
Definitely better than how we called my sister Worf because of her wild hair and temper!
There's a fantastic (now noncanon, sadly) Trek book called Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory, where Dr. Soong survives in an android body and keeps tabs on Data and Lore, and when he learns that Data installed the emotion chip, he reflects to himself that Data always had to have some kind of emotions, otherwise he'd have no will or desire to do anything. Curiosity, loyalty, a desire for harmony, a drive to improve himself, a sense of duty, a passion for art and music, close bonds with other beings...Data didn't experience emotions the same way humans do, but he was a very driven and passionate person, even if he didn't realize it.
I always saw the episodes "Measure of a Man" and "Offspring" as two of the clearest examples of Data expressing emotion. In the trial in the former, he was clearly bothered by revealing his relationship with Tasha. That is very much an example of emotion. And when he was trying desperately to save Lal, those who saw it remarked on it, including Dr. Crusher and Admiral Haftel.
I’m part of the group that says Data had emotions. He had a best friend and a pet. He understood the feelings of the Betazed that ran away with Tin Man. He had a daughter. I suppose that someone could explain all that away, but I choose to believe that it means that he has feelings, but they are suppressed, and the emotion chip removes the restraint.
The way he tries to save Lal... Holy crap. After that there's no way anyone can tell me Data didn't love his daughter.
This is the theory I think is probably closer to what the writers probably had in mind, that he has emotions but that they were switched off or suppressed. We see examples of this, in the episode when Data is recalled by Soong, and when he's in the lab, Soong just tells him where the information in his mind will be and Data is able to access it, which implies that there are levels of his mind he can't access directly without assistance. Another example of this is the dream program that gets kicked off by the energy beam contact in the cross over episode with Bashir. I think that Data was supposed to eventually get to the point that emotions were unlocked, but Soong was dying and wanted to give Data a gift, and the chip was designed to remove the suppression of emotions.
@@manjackson2772 oops sorry you’re right
Perhaps, through Data, TNG is trying to explore how emotion is defined. Even if he is not feeling "real human emotions", his positronic brain could have created some proxy which serves a similar purpose but manifests in a less familiar way.
Yes, Data can not communicates what the feels, even to himself, so he concludes that he does not feel. Words to describe it do not exist.
Data has always seemed very neurodivergently coded to me. As a part of that, there is a type of neurodivergence that makes it difficult or impossible for people with it to identify their own emotions. Personally, I always figured that Data did have emotions he just couldn't identify them or experienced them differently to other people and the chip just allowed him to understand and experience them in a more neurotypical way
Yes indeed, I can't help but think that if we were to get stories about Data being written today the neurodivergent allegory would be ladled on thicker than clotted cream.
The episode with the blank poetry is another good evidence of his emotions.
Nailed it
This!!
Exactly how I see it. I also think this was exactly according to Soong's design. After the failure that was Lore, Daddy Soong needed to tweak Data's 'emotional subroutines' just a tad. He's also enough of a bastard to straight up lie to his son about the whole 'no emotions' thing.
I'm actually disappointed it wasn't all a poem, oh well
Ditto...
Release the Shive-r cut!
My wife wrote several fanfics about Data a few years back, driven by spite over her dislike of the movie Nemesis. The assumption she and I came up with while figuring out the plot was that Data possesses basic emotions at an unconscious level, but has a deliberate block which prevents him from consciously feeling or being aware of those emotions in any way. The "emotion chip" was essentially just acting as a bridge to allow him to actually feel and be aware of those unconscious emotions. We based this both on observing that Data many times acted as if he had fundamental emotional drives and motivations for his behavior throughout the show, as well as reasoning what would have been the easiest and most likely development path for Doctor Soong to have followed. Soong had already developed an emotional android with Lore, but Lore was unstable and ruled by rapidly changing emotions. Leaving the emotions in place but blocking the connection from the emotional generation code to Data's conscious decision-making would have been a lot easier than redesigning the entire brain to have no emotions at all, and it would also make it easier to patch emotions back in later.
I like to use a Terminator analogy. Terminators are designed by Skynet to be remorseless killers hunting down Humans without pity.... and yet... they seemingly have emotions. Not the same as Human emptions to be sure, but still.... they can get angry, confused, and in the case of Cromartie... get annoyed because someone is wasting his time. that was a particularly creative one.
Cromartie is trying to find the Human resistance fighters in the present day, he finds a teen who claims to have useful info, drives around for a while but gets annoyed at the girl for babbling about nonsense Cromartie didn't care about for an hour or so... so Cromartie throws her out of the car... he could easily have killed her but chose instead to safely eject her from the vehicle and just leave her behind, stranded miles from home.
Also, Cromartie at one point murders another Terminator for getting in his way. Not a Terminator working for the Resistance like Cameron, but one who was going to kill one of the Humans Cromartie had been getting information from. Weird choice when he could have just asked the other Terminator for help. Nope, sneak attack backstab murdered.
My thought is that because Data is the same design as Lore he has the inbuilt capability to feel emotions. However, because Lore went crazy, Dr. Soong added a patch to Data's programing to suppress those emotions and prevent him from feeling the full range of human emotion. But the patch isn't total and sometimes emotions will get through, just nothing too strong or overwhelming. The emotion chip is designed to keep Data emotionally stable, it's an anti-insanity chip. When it's installed it fully unlocks his preexisting emotional capabilities while keeping them in check.
Yeah it's notable that Data had been exploring that "dreaming" subroutine... BEFORE getting the emotion chip.
Doesn't Soong explicitly state the exact opposite of your theory in an actual episode though lol
I mean he says I designed the emotion chip for Data to give him emotions but Lore stole it and it doesn't work for Lore because it was designed for Data, it's kind of open and shut
@@kylezo Does the chip add the hardware processing for emotions or just apply a software patch? So is it more like an EPU (emotional processing unit) or like a ROM chip (with the necessary drivers and databases).
There is a condition that I just read about called Alexithymia, a sort of "emotional color blindness" where you have emotions but can't really identify them.
either i have this or i’m just anhedonic
LOL I JUST mentioned this condition to a friend when talking about this video.
It’s a common part of autism and often ADHD!
I suspect having that and that's why data vibes so hard with me.
(adhd and autism here)
from my experience: it's like you still definitely have emotions, you just sometimes don't really realize them, until you are yelling, and like.... oh, apparently this is really pissing me off.
or when I talk about traumatic shit and at some point I start shaking and realize... oh it's probably emotionally too much to me?
it's not like being a fun cool robot tho, because you definitely still have emotions... not being aware of them tho makes it hard to listen to what your mental health needs, if that makes sense?
but some parts of datas experience definitely vibe.
It literally means "no words for feelings" and yes.
The human brain actually does some very quick logical calculations based on past experience and available information when making decisions about what to do. We call it instinct or emotion because the brain doesn't usually show its work. The amygdala, a major emotional centre of the brain, is basically a threat calculator.
A human brain makes you feel fear, while a positronic brain says, "running away is the strategy most likely to mitigate this danger at this time."
That's why Vulcans complaining about silly little human emotions has always rung a little false for me.
The scene in Ten Forward where Data says he hates the drink but then asks for more is easily one of my favorite Trek comedy bits.
Happy Holidays Steve! ❤️
That is the generations movie after he gets the emotions chip.
"Can someone experience emotions an not recognize them?" There is a reason Data is the poster child of people on the Autism Spectrum. As a child I honestly thought I didn't experience emotions. My evidence was that I didn't cry when watching sad movies, and didn't laugh when watching comedies. I didn't recognize my more subtle reactions as being emotional.
I went through a period of a few years when I was in a series of stage plays in a community theater. After a while, I started to think about the differences, if any, between my emotional reactions on stage, and the ones I had in real life. It made me much more conscious of my own motivations and behavior, which I think is a good thing; so in a sense I became less emotional and certainly more contemplative.
@@peterwyetzner5276 yeah, in my case I don't WANT to cry watching sad movies... so i don't.
I concluded years ago that Data always experienced low key emotions .He was capable of being disturbed by an experience (Like his nightmares) and of wishing to have a creative outlet (Music ,painting and poetry ) He was able to express disappointment in himself if he felt he had fallen short in some way .If he had no feelings he would have simply analysed the fault as he understood it and avoided it next time a similar situation arose .He showed a concern for his friends that went beyond simple ethics and occasionally even expressed insecurity .Grand flights of joy or anger may have been beyond him, but he showed too many complex ,and technically unnecessary, responses to be totally devoid of emotion .
always thought the emotion chip was the 1.0 patch for his integrated emotions (So they would work properly)
yeah, this. Soong mentioned that the real difference between Data and Lore was "programming". Also, Lore didn't actually USE the chip in the way Data later did. which raises the question: did Lore have emotions because of the chip... or because his programming worked differently?
I had assumed that Data had some kind of empathy programming as another way to counter the ‘cold murderous logic’ of Lore. That over time as he gained new experiences and deepened relationships his empathy program developed and he better echoed human emotion and reactions. It might even be something similar to the way he describes friendship. His brain becomes used to certain stimuli and he unconsciously emulates it. In the crossover episode with DS9 we learn that he has programming that only unlocks after a certain level of development and that he was designed to mimic breathing and blinking. The idea of unconscious social mimicry would make sense if your goal was to program an android who could ‘fit in’ wherever they are over time but don’t want to include emotions.
The cool thing about Data was his programming was designed to improve over time. I always figured Soong withheld the emotion chip from him because he knew he needed to develop as a being first or the emotion chip would likely just turn him into another psychopath like Lore.
Great episode. I'm in the camp that has always felt that Data didn't have HUMAN emotions, he had his OWN emotional spectrum that, as suggested, he didn't have the language to process as such because he was always comparing them to his expectations.
I agree. The emotions of an artificial intelligence need not align with those of a human.
I think overall, Data did have emotions, but they were muted, interpreted through a lens of pure logic and lacked the context necessary to properly understand them. What the chip did was removed those limitations on him, it gave him the context needed to understand them and caused him to experience his emotions with much greater intensity. Episodes such as "The Quality of Life" further demonstrate Datas capacity for emotion as he seeks to protect the Exocomps in spite of everyone else dismissing the idea that they could be sentient.
The chip adding the database of how to identify and interpret emotions. The hardware functionality was there, but he needed the patch to make proper use of it.
What if the emotion chip is an amplifier and that is why Soong told Lore it wasn't meant for him, due to the instability it would cause?
As Doctor Pulaski pointed out, I have always believed that Data had emotions, he just didn't know how to express them like a typical human
I always felt like Data could not process emotions, but did actually have them. He just lacked the wiring to understand what they fully meant, or to interpret their signs in other people. Emotions can be subtle things, and their more obvious signs have many layers of nuance we only understand because we are literally built to do so. Without his emotion chip, Data is not built to process, express, or interpret emotions, but I think they are there, in a kind of understated way.
The thing is, their are kind of two things that get described by the word emotion. The more superficial sensation certain combination of brain chemicals make. And on the other hand there is the more deeper lying parts of your personality and your connections to other people. When we say data does not feel emotions before he gets the chip, I think we are talking about the first thing not the second one. I would even say this character invites us to ponder about the relationship between the two.
Maybe we saw Data _developing_ emotions gradually over the course of the show as part of his character arc, as his experiences grew and changed him.
I think this is the only interpretation that really feels sensible to me, the idea that he'd just be fundamentally incapable of any sort of emotion ever without the chip just seems nonsensical given the fact that he's specifically made to be capable of learning and changing.
I'd argue that emotions are nothing more than reflexive logic (albeit in us fleshy creatures that logic is from the perspective of evolution, not the individual), starting with the most basic "i must survive, thus anything that threatens my survival is Bad and anything that aids my survival is Good" and from there becoming more and more specific.
But also that doesn't mean he understands or realizes this, just like how we don't necessarily understand our instincts or our muscle memory. He certainly seems to act on basic emotion without even realizing what he's doing, and everyone around him is so utterly used to emotions that it doesn't even register to them as unusual.
There's of course also the autistic coding, and being autistic myself i can say that i sometimes have similar things (maybe the polar opposite actually?), where i experience an emotion but i don't really "feel" it as such, i just recognize that that something is unpleasant and take action to avoid it. A direct example of this sorta thing is that oftentimes when i'm near something sad i fully recognize that it's sad, but i don't *feel* sad, but other times the sadness hits like a truck and i'm sobbing for minutes on end until it runs out and i kinda just snap back to not being sad again.
I believe that Data had developed the capacity to feel emotions. To my mind, this is why he had problems with the emotion chip - he was experiencing conflicting emotions from his own feelings and from the emotion chip.
It's possible that Data felt emotions the whole time, but they were android emotions that he couldn't form context for because he's the only android and had no one else to compare them with. The times where it seems that he's developing emotions it where android emotion overlaps with human emotions. The "emotion" chip gives him human emotions which he has plenty of experience with to give context.
In college, one of my programming teachers had us break down our decision making into if-then-else statements. This exercise allowed me to see more clearly how like computers we are.
With that in mind, I can see data experiencing emotion but on a more basic level. He may not feel the pain of loss but he is still experiencing emotion.
I feel (lol) that data's curiosity was a result of some kind of emotional response. So I believe he did have emotions but because all emotions are defined in organic terms he was simply unaware of his emotions, if we felt his emotions we probably wouldn't recognize it as emotions as we know them. Hell he had an attachment to Tasha because their relationship meant so much to him
I always thought the emotion chip was more of a chip that turns off the safety protocols on Data's emotions. Remember Lore had emotions minute one, its safe to say that Data did too.
I've made a similar argument in the past for "Isaac", the android character on The Orville. My opinion is that Isaac has been perfectly capable of feeling emotions, but has a strong need to *believe* that he doesn't... so, in cases where he is clearly reacting out of emotion, he makes some kind of plausible "excuse" for why his action was a logical, plausible one.. BUT, let's be honest, the Orville ended (MINOR SPOILER) .....
...with Isaac's wedding to Claire--- and what emotionless being chooses to get married? -- during which he said, "The only occasion on which I ever made an error in judgement was 21 hours, 7 minutes, & 14 seconds after you terminated our coupling. I cannot experience emotion; however, I would prefer not to experience error."
Like Mork and Mindy when Mindy pointed out to Mork that he was displaying emotions even though he said he didn't have any
I was told that living beings need emotions to survive
I think Data has emotions before receiving the chip, but not typical human emotions. In particular, the chip may just activate and simulate the physiological responses associated with emotions. Take anger, for example: in The Most Toys, Data recognizes that Fajo killing Varria is a violation of ethics, but his heartbeat probably doesn't accelerate. He experiences the cognitive -- one could say intellectual -- side of anger. On the other hand, in Descent, Part One, Lore may simply be making him feel the physical aspects that allow Data to describe his feeling as anger.
Also, I think this question is valuable. In general, people need to realize that others may understand their emotions differently. Cultural, personal, and medical factors influence my experience and expression of "joy", for instance. My "joy" may be a little different from your "joy", and that's okay.
We just did an episode about "Generations" (that's sort of a Christmas movie, right?). We talked a bit about how the emotion chip should always have been a placebo instead of an actual emotion-generator.
In the time between when I watched TNG on TV as a child and rewatching it with my wife who had never seen it, I was diagnosed with severe depression. I got treatments for it, and over that and therapy started better recognizing my own emotional responses, as well as just having my brain actually “feel” them more intensely (depression to me wasn’t “sad” all the time it was “emotion and motivation not found” all the time). So when we got to TNG and Data, my wife and I immediately recognized Data in that experience. The emotions were there but were “clouded” or “dampened”. When the emotion chip showed up, my wife even referred to it as “electro-Lexapro” because he’d clearly had emotions, but this helped him regulate and express them better.
I was thinking of this myself, and how the emotions chip seemed analogous to… well anti-depressants. Its an aid that let data feel fully rather than the muted existence beforehand.
i always felt the chip either allowed him to understand them, or because he was active for so long he developed them naturally as his program expanded and he just didn't understand them
My counterargument to the whole "Data instantly recognises human emotions as different from his default internal state" thing is that Data emotions _are_ different from human emotions, but also they're stronger because they're all artificially generated. Additionally, he's been focusing on understanding human emotions since shortly after he was activated, while he may not understand humour, he can, at least, recognise what laugher and anger look like and could then make the connection to what that feels like when he does feel them. As mentioned earlier in the video, he'd never even given a thought to trying to understand what Data emotions are like because he didn't realise they were a thing. Data having different kinds of emotions is no different than pets or other animals having different kinds of emotions. We know when our dog is happy, depressed, excited, iritated, angry, amorous, or tired, but that's about it, their emotional range is much smaller than that of most people, and their experiences of those emotions are clearly different from how we experience them. Because he's a truly artificial intelligence (rather than a copy of a biological intelligence) Data's emotions are drastically different from human emotions, though they can manifest in ways we can interpret through a human emotional lens. Because Data's emotions are evolving out of the way his neural net is developing, it makes sense that they would start out very weak and get stronger over time similar to how neural nets in current, deep learning AI develop routes through the net which activate more and more strongly when given multiple similar inputs. And, finally, since Data wasn't actually paying attention to his emotions, that would stunt their development. Personally, I think the emotion chip did him a _massive_ disservice since it meant it permanently stunted the continued development of his own emotions in favour of human emotions.
Personally, I think that Data did experience emotions all along - they were just severely muted compared to what most people experience. The emotion chip didn't create emotions out of whole cloth, it simply enhanced what was already there - to the point where they were overwhelming to Data when he first experienced them.
I think something similar. "Data had emotions all along" certainly doesn't have to mean "the chip changed nothing".
Yes. No emotion, no motivation. The chip gives him strong passion, which he has no experience handling.
I don't even know if the chip 'enhanced' them so much as 'plugged them in to his body.' There's a huge difference between understanding that you hate someone and getting that blood-boiling rage tearing through your body. I personally think THAT'S what the emotion chip added, allowing Data to feel the actual feedback of his emotions instead of just having to logic based on them.
I always thought emotions were in there somewhere. Watch when Pulaski relented to the correct pronunciation to his name, and tell me he didn't feel something in even a limited capacity. The firmware was there, it just needed update to run it.
Years ago, Game Boy enhanced cartridges came out. In your handheld, it was 4 but grayscale, but in SNES adapter, magically 8 bit color.
Hi Steve, Since Jessie Gender has gotten pretty close with the cast and creators of Lower Decks, I feel like her getting a guest spot in the show might be in the cards. If she got you the opportunity to do a cameo or play a secondary character alongside her, would you do it?
I am picturing you as a grumpy Tellarite who feels the same way about the crew of the Cerritos and their adventures as you do about Lower Decks. Could be fun and meta!
They've worked together before.
I think data always had the neural pathways necessary for the emotions ,the only thing the chip did was give the input something to be decoded by. He can act on feelings as he does have them and he can interpret them in a limited way, but the chip is what takes those input feelings, fleshes them out and unpacks them into full emotions letting him know what he's feeling. Lore didn't just send Data emotions in "the Descent" but the definitions as to what those feeling were as well.
the way I always figured it, is that like, how could Data know he ~wasn't~ feeling emotions? Like ther's literally no way to tell without being able to switch consciousness with someone. I think he was just told he has no emotions and assumed it was true
I have always thought that Data had Proto-emotions, either given to him by Soong, or developed along the way. Not true full on emotions obviously, but subtle giving him the curiosity, and loyalty, but not to the level of obsession or single minded devotion. They would not over ride his logical thought process, but may provide context for some of his decisions.
I always read Data’s pre-chip “emotions” as programmed mimicry or display of reactions that observers would expect. His algorithms produced behavior that humanoids would find familiar and comforting, that they would read as emotion, but **internally** he felt none.
In Descent part 2, when Geordi is trying to talk Data out of what he’s doing to him, Data hesitates and has a moment of conscience even though he’s only been fed anger and hate by Lore. So it seems he does have the ability to experience another emotion on his own. He can’t identify it but it’s enough to make him stop what he’s doing to Geordi and re-examine.
I suspect Data has always had the emotions, but lacked the ability to understand or interpret them as such. Emotions are complicated, and Noonian Soong may have been able to integrate the raw emotions without the higher levels of awareness, and self control required to regulate emotions. This could imply that Data would develop complete emotions over time as his positronic brain developed and learned to understand what he was feeling. However, while on the long road of discovering emotions, the hidden emotions were always present, and often presented when the strongest of them were experienced, brought on by loss, anger and perhaps even hatred and disgust.
Very interesting yes I agree
In my mind, he developed emotions, like he developed a personality and sentience. He just can't express it the same way, but the fact that he has friends, hobbies and instincts, show that he's outgrown his original programming.
I've always believed that Data has something that amounts to emotions without being emotions, in the same way that you can create art of an object by shading the area around where the object isn't. He may not be able to feel in the way we would, but he still cares and loves. It's similar to how someone with low affect can still live a fulfilling life, if they choose to.
And then the emotion chip gives Data the actual feelings.
Also in "Most toys", why would Data put on, the clothes Kivas gave him, after burning his uniform, if Data is just an android without emotions and feelings. Shouldn't it be completely irrelevant to him whether he wears clothes or not, especially if someone forces him to (or that is part of so called ethical program in Data)? Or even , why Data should resist to Bruce Madoxx experiment on him in Measure of Man episode. Is that instinct or emotion? I personally think that Picard, and especially Spock, most of the time doesn't show much more, feelings and emotions than Data. Great video, thanks.
Data wears clothes because when he was first activated, he saw no logical need for them (being an Android) so Soong and Juliana had to program with a modesty subroutine in order to get him to stay dressed, because he was, after all, "anatomically correct". XD
@@ZeoViolet exactly what I was about to reply.
The very last interaction between Data and KF tells me that he may have lingering trauma about the incident. Just as Data turns to walk out, KF snaps his fingers. Data pauses for a moment. I haven't gone looking but I'll bet he has a response of some kind to the snapping of fingers after that.
WRT Measure of a Man, Data has a sense of self-preservation. Whether it's a pre-programmed thing or something he developed, it's there. He even says in the episode, "I am the culmination of one man's dream. This is not ego or vanity, but when Doctor Soong created me he added to the substance of the universe. If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique, something wonderful will be lost. I cannot permit that. I must protect his dream." He knows that he has to preserve himself.
Not sure if someone already mentioned this, and I've not seen the episode in a while so I can't be certain, but if Fajo still had his proximity forcefield working, then Data would not have been able to apprehend him by hand. He had to do it from a distance, and the only weapon available was the disruptor. Fajo threatened to keep murdering people until Data complied, so that rather limits his choices
I thought about this. Data could have held everyone at gunpoint indefinitely, trying to get more to turn on Fajo. I think he had time, he didn't know he was getting beamed out. No one was getting murdered at that moment so killing Fajo right then did not make logical sense - I call emotions, which confused him leading him to then mislead Riker about what he had done - also from an emotional place. Data could have said "I believed that the crew was in mortal danger, so I fired" and everyone would have understood, but he didn't. maybe because he felt some shame over feeling and reacting to rage
As someone who is both "on the spectrum" and has chronic depression, It seems to me that Data might have had emotions, but they were muted. I feel all sorts of emotions, but I don't often get really furious or joyous or excited. Did you know you can have an anxiety attack without perceiving an emotional sense of anxiety or panic? I can get short of breath, pins and needles in my extremities, and a pounding heart, and still feel emotionally calm, or at most annoyed at the physical sensations. Maybe Data was the same way. The emotion chip merely amplified his emotions so that he could laugh or panic or rage. Without it his feelings were very subdued but present.
Now it's been a while since I watched the episodes that were about Data's emotions but what stood out to me was the chip was referred to as giving Data basic emotions which kind of implies the existence of higher emotions which seems to be something Data does have. Sure something like a connection to a friend or former lover may not be as flashy as anger or satisfaction but I'd argue that it still counts as an emotion. And it goes a long way towards explaining how Data can seem to be reacting emotionally even though he shouldn't be able to
I feel like Data was building emotions. Through study and emulation they were becoming part of his programming. The emotion chip was just a shortcut. Q letting him laugh, might have also helped to jumpstart the process. I could see that without the emotion chip Data would naturally start to feel a wide range of emotions in the coming years.
One aspect not included in the analysis of the text are the examples where Data shows emotion because he is under someone else's control. Think of Ira Graves or Power Play. Those could indicate that his hardware is fully capable of emotion when running different "software". That's exactly what Soong said in Brothers. In that light I believe the emotion chip wasn't hardware but updated software, like a BIOS patch on a thumb drive.
Obviously bringing my own personal experience to it, but I've always read Data as a being that has limited emotions and only knows how to describe those emotions in non-emotional terms, until the emotion chip connects him freely to "full" emotional experience, and he learns to integrate that into his life experience.
This reading arises from multiple episodes where we see Data struggling to deal with certain experiences, and even describing mechanically how his positronic brain experiences friendship. Being able to mechanically describe things like dopamine reception in our own brains doesn't make them not emotional experiences, it just demonstrates physical understanding of the mechanism.
Consider also that Data makes various choices throughout the series that are very incongruous if we take the show's word about things like Data's morality processing. WITHOUT being influenced by Lore, or having his dreams activated, or whatever. Are there moral and ethical codes that line up with Data discharging that disruptor? Yes. Do those codes line up to what we are told was programmed into Data? No.
Looked at a different way, imagine if Data were an alien species that hadn't gone through adult metamorphosis (so, like, second puberty, or something) yet, and then the emotion chip plotline of the movie he instead undergoes that biological process and develops full emotional experience.
Or remove most of the layers of sci-fi metaphor, and make him a human character whose brain is hardwired differently...do we have words for that? I feel like we have words for that...and then the emotion chip arc is them experimenting with something like, I dunno, advanced electrical currents to activate certain neural connections with only one layer of "this newly discovered alien grub" techno babble layered on top.
I don't mean to present this as a definitive reading, only a very applicable one to consider. Especially considering what everyone now knows thanks to hindsight about Data as neuro-divergent representation.
honestly, it feels a bit distateful from the part of the writers presenting Data has not having human emotions, when so much people with depression or psychosis have difficulties connecting with their emotions
the way data feels after getting his chip is akin to several experiences of people with mental illness when they seem to get off bit from dissociating
I think it definitely takes emotion to appreciate Riker whistling (the end to) "pop goes the weasel" "how easily you humans do that.....".
Mine was his programming always had the ability to learn and adapt. He learnt basic concepts of emotion and expressed in the only way he's program could.
Great video. Very interesting and well put. At some point during TNG, Data made a leap of faith (I believe that was the title of this specific episode) that he could become more than his program. I think that prior to getting the emotion chip, he did just that. Plus, the word ‘EMOTION’ seems to cover a wide range of different feelings. Maybe he was capable to feel some of them, while other were out of his reach until he got the chip. When you consider things this way, doesn’t it mean that compassion is a more basic human feeling than pleasure? There is hope in thinking so. Happy holidays. 🎉
Yes, in Descent, Lore clearly used 'emotions' as a drug and overdosed him on the passionate ones.
Collector: "You can put on the clothes I got for you, or you can walk around totally naked!"
Data: "Do you believe me to be Dr. Phlox?"
I believed Data had emergent emotions. It's not unreasonable to think a self-aware being with that much complexity might form something we would label emotions. He clearly cared about Geordie and Tasha.
Spiner is a wonderful actor. The spot at 16:37 is a shot of Data, his face a mask of hatred, anger and disgust all at once. 3 emotions, displayed with just his face.
well done.
I always thought Data had very limited access to emotions so he could deal better with all the bigoted teasing than Lore when he was essentially newborn. And whatever limited his access continued to work even after downloading his daughter, Lall’s programming. Once he did that, he acquired her ability to feel things strongly unless checked by something. Therefore the emotion chip simply turned off whatever was dampening his access as did unusually strong emotions.
How did you get through this without touching on Data's relationship with Tasha? He surely couldn't have had that relationship without some capability for emotion.
And how he kept the hologram of her all that time.
The real emotions are the friends we made along the way
For what it's worth, it's called Alexithymia. It's a decently common personality trait where one simply can't really notice, identify, or describe their own emotions. Around ten percent of the population has it. It's sometimes called "Tin-man syndrome". I, personally, am a very empathic and sympathetic person... who has a lot of issues recognizing my own emotions or even that I'm feeling anything at all.
I also suffer from(as it were) anhedonia, and when I manage to treat it, I can in fact get into renditions of the "This is awful, I loathe it." "More?" "Yes please!" and "Precious Little Life Form" bits without meaning to. So, I always read Data as having the same sort of flattened emotions and inability to recognize them as I do.
My feeling is that Data had emotions that developed as an emergent property of his development, but he never really recognized them for what they were. The emotion chip just gave him an imitation of the human experience of emotions.
I always thought that Data had muted emotions, but he, for the most part, wasn't able to recognize them for what they truly were. There is a very brief instant where we saw Data look truly pissed off, and Fajo knew, on a fundamental level, that he was a dead man.
For all of her faults Dr. Pulaski began to recognize his emotions and even defended them against his other friends. At the end of the 2nd season I saw her as being one of Data's biggest supporters. I'm sorry that we never got to see her again. I think that she would have cried enough for them both after Data lost Lal. I think that she would have also become fast friends with Data's mother. Someone else that we should have seen more.
I always felt that through most of TNG they tried to subtly imply that Data had emotions but didn't recognize them as such. They definitely abandon this going into Descent and Generations. But I kind of preferred the earlier implication versus what we ended up getting. It was like Data was slowly finding emotions, which would have been a much more compelling character arc than him simply being gifted them all at once. One of my favorite "Data might have emotions" moments was in Data's Day. In his voice over log to Commander Maddox, he states "Since Vulcans are incapable of lying, I must accept the Ambassador's explanation as the truth, but I would still prefer a 'gut feeling' to back up this conclusion." The brilliant irony there being that Data does suspect something about the Ambassador, so he does have a gut feeling that is telling him that something isn't right. He just doesn't realize that it is a gut feeling.
The way I've always thought of it is that emotions aren't only thoughts or feelings. They're a complex combination of both. Data had and further developed the mental underworking of a full set of emotions, but he couldn't actually feel them physically like we do. So sometimes he would react in a way that seemed emotional because his thoughts fully lined up with what would accompany that emotion. I also think this is why Soong didn't give him emotions right away, he gave them to lore before lore was ready and they overwhelmed him, he gave data time to learn and grow into his own person before allowing him to feel the emotions even though he had already programmed in the logical underpinnings that would drive the emotions.
Data's real emotions were the friends we made along the way.
Lol I'm dying 🤣
Hello Steve Shives and fans,
I have always had a different theory to this question, does Data have Emotions. My theory is that the Emotion Chip can be better described as an Emotion Processor. Data's positronic brain was designed to adapt and evolve through experience and time, allowing Data to unlock new abilities, like dreaming. Data's positronic brain was designed to develop emotions slowly through experiences like an organic brain does but couldn't fully process them the same way until the Emotion Chip was emplaced.
Compared to Lore. Lore's emotions were fully activated driving him insane but when Lore got the Emotion Chip making him more controlled.
Data obviously had emotions, they were so apparent that the crew members even perceived him as having feelings, even though he kept insisting that he didn’t have them. The problem wasn’t him not having emotions, it’s just that the emotions that he did feel he didn’t understand how they correlated to how other people expressed them and his were much more subdued in comparison to other peoples. He even admitted at one point that he was capable of missing people, which is an emotion, he just didn’t understand it as such
This is a general other way the topic might have been addressed - through the reaction of others. Example: Dr. Crusher, in "The Offspring" says she finds it hard to believe that Data is incapable of giving Lal love. I think the ending makes a case that she was right to think that way. The reaction of Admiral Haftel to what Data did to the systems failure of Lal is of a person reacting to the profound emotion of another, not just his own.
this is pretty much exactly the video i would have commissioned. my thoughts were that Data is always depicted as being curious. i imagine most people don't consider curiosity an emotion, but i think it can be defined as a desire for knowledge, and desire IS an emotion.
I used to think Data was a conscious being, but then ChatGPT made me rethink everything.
Even though, when I got older, Picard was creeping up to challange his spot (not the cat), Data has been and still is my favourite character on TNG.
Thanks for a, as per usual, very insightful video.
I think we're making the question too binary. I'd posit that Data didn't start with emotions, but was slowly developing them. Given a couple hundred years of personal growth, I believe he would have developed a full range of emotions on his own. The chip was a cheat code or short cut that I never felt meshed well with the narrative of Data's quest for his own humanity. Joining Starfleet, playing poker, getting a cat, exploring music, painting, and the theater, engaging in friendships....all of that was thrown out when they brought in the chip.
Thank you for supporting all people as well!
I feel that a lot of this can be explained by the fact that Data *wants* to be human and have emotions. He could be acting in a way that simulates emotions. "What would a human who experiences anger or compassion do in this situation?"
Steve. I'm sorry if this isn't the place to say so..... but I just wanted to let you know how much joy and happiness you bring into my life. I regret not saying so sooner, but I HAD to tell you how much you're appreciated! I love ALL your vids... I enjoy so much the member perks and getting to hang out with ya. it's like looking up to a senior when you're a freshman. I just admire you, agree with you, and think you're funny as hell. it was overdue that I said so.
As someone who has much computer experience. It is many times easier to block off access to certain parts of a program than to re-write the whole thing. In essence what I'm saying is the Data's father simply blocked the emotion programming that was already present. He said the were only minor differences in programming, between him and Lore. The chip was simply a dongle to allow access to those functions already in his system. What little emotions Data felt or expressed were simply leakage between those functions and the rest of his human emulation programming.
Also from 29:00 to 29:13 excellent wrestling bit, well executed and delivered perfectly *chef's kiss*
To the point about it being Data making assumptions...
I seem to recall an episode where the crew is dealing with some Vulcan bigwig and Data states in his log that even though all evidence looks above board, he still had misgivings. He goes on to state that since he is incapable of having hunches he will dismiss his misgivings.
Data... buddy... that *was* a hunch. You just had a hunch.
The emotion chip was the equivalent of Dumbo's feather. Data had emotions but did not know and could not recognize he had emotions and did not believe he could get emotions except for outside instances where he believed he could get emotions.
Great thought piece here. I wanted to check to see who wrote the episode the Most Toys. Her name is Shari Goodhartz. She was also a writer in two of the darkest TNG episodes Night Terrors and Violations. Interesting these episodes also have as their primary theme emotions. It’s interesting that the most human Data becomes is with a writer that is not usually part of the writers room. This does not negate her work in any way or makes it any less canon. Nonetheless it doesn’t appear to be something that the writers room explored so richly ever again.
It has been suggested that our emotion is integral to our ability to take initiative. The fact that Data has always been able to take initiative and has always been portrayed as expressing bemusement or a certain degree of pleasure with interactions with other beings (thinking Bashir describing Data as "personable") or affection for the memory of Tasha makes me think that Data has always had subtle emotions, but it took the emotion chip for him to be able to feel more intense emotions like the anger and aggression seen in Descent or pretty much the full range of emotions in Generations after the chip is installed.
I always read this as Data had emotions but lacked full awareness of them, so they'd manifest kind of like how people with a severed corpus callosum can't say they see things in their left visual field, the part of their brain that has the power of speech literally can't even though a part of them definitely does see it. Data can't directly process the emotions it felt like, and the emotion chip connected him to them consciously. I got the vibe that sometimes Data didn't know why he would do certain things because he wasn't aware of the emotions below the surface.
I always felt that there was a massive missed opportunity to explore the idea of data as a “culture of one” as Picard called it vis a vis him having feelings. I’m convinced he does. They’re just not human feelings. He feels as an android would, and yet he’s tragically convinced that humans are some sort of emotional gold standard. Consider when Lal tells him she loves him, and he says “I wish I could.” That is *not* something a being without feeling would say. He has loyalties, friendships, even sentimentality as displayed in “Measure of a Man” when he can’t come up with a reason for keeping his medals beyond just wanting them. Or when he talks about how he “misses” people when they’re gone after his programming has adjusted to their presence. It’s not that he lacked emotions. It’s that he spent the whole series convinced that human emotions are the only way to feel rather than accepting himself and his way of experiencing the world around him as equally valid and worth exploring to their fullest.
I always believed that Data HAD emotions but his programming only allowed him to process it from a purely analytical concept. His chip was like a software update to translate those feeling to another level. And that Data needed to become mature enough to handle those emotions otherwise he would have been just like his brother. I think he was similar to the tin man/lion/scarecrow in that he already had in him the qualities that he was seeking. It was the journey (not the chip) that prepared him to have emotions
"I was blinded by the Light". From Geordi. This. This is excellent. Happy Chrismas & New Years.
The first time I started to question if Data did experience emotion without the ability to truly understand to express all along was part 2 of "Redemption." He's dealing with a prejudice first officer all episode and after being questioned one too many times during a time-critical situation he snaps "Mr. Hobson! You will carry out my orders or I will relieve you of duty!" There is an argument to be made that Data was just emulating what he'd seen his superiors do in the past, but it seemed genuine to me. I was about 13 or 14 the first time I saw that episode and we just learning to read beyond the surface layer a narrative presents. You could say Star Trek and Data helped me understand the concept of subtext.
I think Data was always capable of feeling emotions, but there was something Soong put in him that severely inhibits it. The Emotion Chip is really a partial disabler of this programming. If you've noticed in other android based Star Trek episodes, other androids were capable of feeling emotions, but it caused malfunctions to happen. You can see it in Lal as well as TOS's Mr. Norman and his other android brethren.