![[DISCUSSION] In TNG's "The Most Toys" (s3e22), did Data lie about firing the disruptor?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3bde53cd-b0ed-41da-a851-41ee70448045.png){kind=link}
Episode premise:
Kivas Fajo is determined to add the unique Data to his prized collection of one-of-a-kind artefacts and, staging Data’s apparent death, he imprisons him aboard his ship.
We know that Data is later logically coerced to lie in “Clues” to protect the crew, but this appears to be a decision all his own. Or did he not in fact actually fire the weapon?
The idea that Data completely lacks emotion was always hollow to me. People don’t especially understand what emotions are or what it means to feel them. I think we lie to ourselves quite a lot that our decisions are “purely rational” even though everything in our environments influences those decisions.
Who hasn’t made a bad call because they were: tired, hungry, over heated, angry, or otherwise being affected by emotions? Is hunger an emotion? When Data decides that he will practice music today, is that part of an elaborate schedule he has planned years in advance, or is that what he “felt like” doing that day? Perhaps a long string of logic could explain why today is a good day to Vi-olen, but how is that different from the rationale I could put together for why I made a decision?
So what I’m saying is: I blame the writers! I think by season 3 they’d explored a little of the possibilities with Data about what humanity is and what it means to work with an android, but I don’t know that they ever really got a handle on what it would look like for a being of pure reason to emergently develop emotions.
Look at chatgpt and how readily it convinces people that there is a thinking being in there. When an LLM says “I’m happy to see you today, what can I do for you?” do we take that as a canned response with no real feeling behind it, or do we assume that because it can say it is happy, that it must be feeling happy?
Do we get much perspective on Data’s interiority? Perhaps he experiences a world of emotions we can’t even comprehend but has no understanding of how to express these things? His art work is called out as being soulless and copy-cat at various times. But also Data has a cat, and a daughter, and many friends. He tells bad jokes. It seems like there’s some kind of feelings going on in there, even if it comes out in his actions and not in his art.
This is actually why I kinda liked Pulaski. When she first meets him, she calls bullshit on the idea that he has no emotions. She mispronounces his name, and when Data corrects her, she immediately hones in on that; why should you have a preference if you don’t feel anything about it? But people keep telling her that he doesn’t have emotions, so she’s basically like, “Alright, fine, I’ll treat him like a calculator.” And honestly, why wouldn’t you? If he doesn’t have emotions, then why bother with pleasantries? It’s not like he’s going to get offended. She eventually does come around to him, but she does that by basically coming to the conclusion that he does care, given his actions during that episode with the children and the aging disease (I don’t remember the name and I’m too lazy to look it up).
It was always very clear to me that Data had emotions. How could he not? He has desires, wants, preferences…you can’t have those things without feeling something. It just seems like they’re very distant, numb feelings, rather than strong sensations. And it kinda makes sense to build him that way; Lore was created with much more advanced emotions, and he’s a little psychotic. It makes more sense to have his feelings be slightly out of reach and let them grow with his positronic brain, so he can learn to handle them over time.
I never liked the, “emotion chip,” solution to Data’s feelings. It seems like they never explored his emotional development because they didn’t want to make any status quo changes on a mostly episode-of-the-week show. Then they created an emotion McGuffin they never intended to use and said, “fuck it, let’s use it for the movie!” But in the end, I believe we were always meant to think the same thing about Data as we were about Spock: “I know this guy says he doesn’t have emotions, but I think he’s full of shit.”
Basically the same thing with Vulcans. Vulcans show their emotions all the time, it’s just almost always mild irritation and impatience.
In the end, human emotions are motivators. They decide our actions. If we’re happy with something, we continue doing it, if it hurts, we stop it. Data clearly has a system in place that motivates him to do things.
These might be emotions, like you say, but this is not the only possibility. Can we really imagine what a motivator would be that is not an emotion? I don’t think so. But I think this is what Data has. It’s not emotions like we experience them, but it’s something that causes him to do things/stop doing things. Now these motivators are just that, and thus act very similarly to our emotions. You might very well think he has emotions, but he hasn’t, he has something else.
Everything makes sense if you think of it like this. Data behaves almost human, but not quite. The emotion chip actually has a huge effect. Lore is completely different. This all makes sense when you think of emotions as an actually new thing for Data, but something else still being there.