Emotional Reduction Characters

[Spacescifi]

Sometimes writers attempt non-human characters by subtracting human emotions.

There are pros and cons to this:

Pro: Congrats! They no longer act human, they really do behave different from your average joe or jane.

Cons: They do not act human. Difficult for reader to empathize with that, and unhuman or nonhuman are terms both used mostly in a negative way.

 

Cons: Eliminate sadness and they no longer can show sympathy or even empathy born of sadness. Eliminate anger and they no longer will feel indignation when evil occurs, and will be more likely to only act in fearful self interest rather than in behalf of protecting those they should care enough to become angry over if anyone or thing hurts them. Eliminate joy and everyone will be sad, mad, or afraid 24/7. Eliminate disgust and there will be no slow escalation to anger, only full on bursts of anger against anything that would normally only cause disgust. Murderous and destructive Klingons basically. Eliminate fear and the death toll goes way up.

 

Your thoughts?

 

I cannot see anyway deleting even one human emotion will serve any scifi civilization well... can you? Your thoughts?

 

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by Spacescifi

[SOXBLOX]

I think the whole idea would qualify as A) lazy writing, and B) Our Humans Are Different. Much better (for hard SF) is to make them really alien and not try to anthropomorphize them at all.

[kerbiloid]

Reduce emotions and you get a successful businessman or politician. No need in sci-fi.

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, SOXBLOX said:

I think the whole idea would qualify as A) lazy writing, and B) Our Humans Are Different. Much better (for hard SF) is to make them really alien and not try to anthropomorphize them at all.

 

If only it were so simple. The well of ideas to draw from is vast but also finite. Just like the chords of music are finite but endless musical variations that are enjoyable can be spawned.

Who defines what is truly alien? The author.

But let's be honest... it won't be original. Nothing in ficfion ever is, since all fiction is drained out the wet towel of reality.

What influences the SF author opinion on what is alien can be but is not limited to beast behavior, evolutionary theory, AI speculation, and tech speculation.

Really in my opinion the only behavior humans are very familar with is human and beastly. Robotic is another, albeit kinda boring to me.

SF Aliens spawned from evolutionary theory may look weirder, but I doubt their rationale for behavior ever strays far from human, animal, or machine behavior derivatives.

Believe me when I say I have seen pleny of ugly non-human aliens behave right in line with either human or beast behavior.

 

When that is the case the story is either man vs man (alien behaves as such anyway) or man vs beast (ditto).

Edited September 24, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Kernel Kraken]

Well, it depends what context the need for emotionless characters is. What are we defining as "emotionless"? Having literally 0 thoughts, acting on commands given from another being? The human concept of emotion drives literally every decision we make. 

[KSK]

A couple of thoughts.

Making aliens really alien is hard and, I would argue, impossible. We can imagine all sorts of behaviors, from sainthood to psychopathy and describe our fictional aliens accordingly,  but those behaviors are always going to be human because human behaviors are the only point of reference we have. It's a bit like asking someone without color vision to describe what 'red' is. We could put together a reasonable concordance by matching up our shades of red to their shades of grey but that's only a translation. Fundamentally, 'red' is an alien concept to them because it's something that they have not and cannot experience directly. Likewise, fictional alien behavior can only ever be translated into human terms.

Also, @Spacescifi, how are you defining an absence of emotion? I ask because I don't think of emotions as an all or nothing thing but as a spectrum. To use your 'joy' example, imagine a scale of 0-100 where 0 represents absolute blackest despair, 100 represents total rapture and 50 represents indifference. 'Joy' in this context would fall somewhere in between 50 and 100.  So when you talk about eliminating joy, are you talking about eliminating everything above 0 on my scale or just everything above 50? 

Also, language being what it is, we use the same word to label a whole range of emotional responses. Take 'love' for example, I might love my parents, love my wife or love grilled cheese sandwiches as my favorite food (not really). Each of those is a perfectly reasonable statement but I like to think that my feelings towards my wife are rather different than my feelings towards grilled cheese sandwiches!   So again, when you talk about eliminating joy - what does that actually mean?

Last thing for now - I'm not sure that emotional elimination is a particularly good way of writing alien characters anyway because it effectively stereotypes them with that missing emotion, making them all rather uniform. To use an obvious example - take the Vulcans and their adherence to logic over emotion. Quick and easy to describe - but it's probably not a coincidence that the one Vulcan we see the most of on-screen is actually half-human, who is logical most of the time - but can also be disarmingly human on occasion. Put another way, emotional elimination characters are a bit like single-biome planets. It's very quick and convenient to have everything take place on the desert world of Arrakis, or the ice world of Hoth but it's also makes your world very boring and probably not that realistic.

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by KSK

[Nuke]

i like the way it was in 2001. hal was more human than the humans it killed or tried to kill. that was damn clever. especially for an ai that was strictly following the program. though one could argue that emotions are an emergent quality of intelligence and you cant have one without the other. 

my favorite ai characters are always the sociopaths. not completely emotionless but theres something missing. using synthetic emotions to try and foster empathy and enforce ethics is probably a good idea. think of it a soft implementation of the asimov laws for robots. you probably don't want to emulate the whole human gamut of emotions because you still want the ai to want to service its creators. which sets up interesting conflicts when something goes wrong. you dont want them to feel jealousy for example because that could make them adversarial towards humans. and you dont want them to feel anger or hate for obvious reasons.

a.i. covered love and attachment pretty well and in the most depressing way possible. something that should not be implemented except in particular situations and can also have far reaching consequences, like when the ai outlives their master. imagine a situation where a robot programmed to be a simple housewife ends up starting a religion around their master some thousand years after they died, when the truth is significantly more mundane. so it might be a good idea to limit those ais to a human life span. the usual gamut of mammalian emotions is almost exclusively for child rearing, which ais usually do not have to do (raised by wolves kind of explores this). 

you want to keep positive emotions for when they do what they are supposed to and negative emotions to punish them for doing wrong, a happy android is something that does what its told. they might even have completely different emotional imperatives that we as humans don't have. say you make an android as a kind of successor species that has mostly human emotions, but are also designed to nullify some of the less desirable aspects of human nature, and having that fail catastrophically could reveal some grim truths about humans. 

[SOXBLOX]

2 hours ago, KSK said:

Making aliens really alien is hard...

If we're talking literary devices, I have a couple suggestions. First, it should be obvious that alien speech, or their equivalent, is being translated, in real time, by a computer. The translation should be clunky and full of holes, filled in by the computer, and be just intelligible enough for the reader to understand.

Since language is so important, I would recommend going and learning a different language, to give yourself a different perspective. (Not an easy task, as many here can surely attest, but worth the effort.) Perhaps aliens cannot conceive of a past tense; their memories are too short, or something like that. Or maybe, they are extremely long-lived, and draw fundamental distinctions between the immediate past and the distant past.

 

[KSK]

18 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

If we're talking literary devices, I have a couple suggestions. First, it should be obvious that alien speech, or their equivalent, is being translated, in real time, by a computer. The translation should be clunky and full of holes, filled in by the computer, and be just intelligible enough for the reader to understand.

Since language is so important, I would recommend going and learning a different language, to give yourself a different perspective. (Not an easy task, as many here can surely attest, but worth the effort.) Perhaps aliens cannot conceive of a past tense; their memories are too short, or something like that. Or maybe, they are extremely long-lived, and draw fundamental distinctions between the immediate past and the distant past.

 

Have you read Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ by any chance? If not, I think you’d like it!

And flipping your clunky translation idea on its head, there’s always the option of including one or two alien words in otherwise idiomatic (or nearly so) English or whichever language you’re writing in, and then having part of the story revolve around explaining that word in human terms. ‘Grok’ from Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ is the example that leaps to mind or the titular ‘Baxbr / Daxbr’ from Evelyn Smith’s  short story.

[Spacescifi]

5 hours ago, KSK said:

A couple of thoughts.

Making aliens really alien is hard and, I would argue, impossible. We can imagine all sorts of behaviors, from sainthood to psychopathy and describe our fictional aliens accordingly,  but those behaviors are always going to be human because human behaviors are the only point of reference we have. It's a bit like asking someone without color vision to describe what 'red' is. We could put together a reasonable concordance by matching up our shades of red to their shades of grey but that's only a translation. Fundamentally, 'red' is an alien concept to them because it's something that they have not and cannot experience directly. Likewise, fictional alien behavior can only ever be translated into human terms.

Also, @Spacescifi, how are you defining an absence of emotion? I ask because I don't think of emotions as an all or nothing thing but as a spectrum. To use your 'joy' example, imagine a scale of 0-100 where 0 represents absolute blackest despair, 100 represents total rapture and 50 represents indifference. 'Joy' in this context would fall somewhere in between 50 and 100.  So when you talk about eliminating joy, are you talking about eliminating everything above 0 on my scale or just everything above 50? 

Also, language being what it is, we use the same word to label a whole range of emotional responses. Take 'love' for example, I might love my parents, love my wife or love grilled cheese sandwiches as my favorite food (not really). Each of those is a perfectly reasonable statement but I like to think that my feelings towards my wife are rather different than my feelings towards grilled cheese sandwiches!   So again, when you talk about eliminating joy - what does that actually mean?

Last thing for now - I'm not sure that emotional elimination is a particularly good way of writing alien characters anyway because it effectively stereotypes them with that missing emotion, making them all rather uniform. To use an obvious example - take the Vulcans and their adherence to logic over emotion. Quick and easy to describe - but it's probably not a coincidence that the one Vulcan we see the most of on-screen is actually half-human, who is logical most of the time - but can also be disarmingly human on occasion. Put another way, emotional elimination characters are a bit like single-biome planets. It's very quick and convenient to have everything take place on the desert world of Arrakis, or the ice world of Hoth but it's also makes your world very boring and probably not that realistic.

 

 

Thanks.

A sliding emotional scale is important, but there are different kinds of love, each of which has a sliding scale.

For example friendship can range from enjoy their company on occasion to full-on kinship 'brother or sister from another mother.' Going even further it can lead to romance and marriage. 

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

Say you make an android as a kind of successor species that has mostly human emotions, but are also designed to nullify some of the less desirable aspects of human nature, and having that fail catastrophically could reveal some grim truths about humans. 

 

Wow. I actually already had such an idea floating around, but it was actually multiple new races of humanoids altogether.

Truths about humanity, grim though they are, are past tense (meaning everything already burned by the time the story begins). What remains are the descendants (humanoids) of what man tried to improve on his base model (human) with, with behaviors that are skewed in some way to make up for human behavioral deficiencies.

In so doing, the descendents become the new powers in the galaxy after humanity's last big interstellar civil war. Either doomed to repeat the mistakes of their makers... or something different. Humans still exist, they are like fallen masters, lacking the influence and power they once had in the galaxy.

Aliens did not exist.

We created them using available DNA and advanced technology.

Welcome scifi universe!

Edited September 24, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Nuke]

i like the term "human derivative species". humans in the future would have likely diversified through genetic engineering, cybernetic enhancements, or complete re-engineering from the ground up as androids. very likely in slow colonization scenarios. every few hundred years someone sends out an interstellar colonization expedition, which takes generations. get to a system that is only slightly habitable, and modify themselves to adapt tp the environment(s) they find. do that for a few million years and you have star trek type aliens everywhere but they are all based on humans. 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

We should not confuse "no emotions" with "no external expression of emotions"

Spoiler

 

[Spacescifi]

8 hours ago, Nuke said:

i like the term "human derivative species". humans in the future would have likely diversified through genetic engineering, cybernetic enhancements, or complete re-engineering from the ground up as androids. very likely in slow colonization scenarios. every few hundred years someone sends out an interstellar colonization expedition, which takes generations. get to a system that is only slightly habitable, and modify themselves to adapt tp the environment(s) they find. do that for a few million years and you have star trek type aliens everywhere but they are all based on humans. 

 

Concept is OK..  yet I tend to think biological engineering is the way to make new races of humanoids.

I am doubtful of androids or cybernetic humans.

I have read that cellphones emit harmful radiation, and even stories of pet animals growing tumours. When the doctors dig it out what do they find in the middle of it? The homing chip device implanted in them to locate them if they get lost!

That is why I really do think tech implants are not the way to go. Designing a new race is perhaps possible, but the knowledge required would mean that we would have a far better understanding of life, the aging process, and even how to slow it.

Edited September 25, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Nuke]

pretty sure the cell phone thing is a myth, as those frequencies are non-ionizing. and pet rfid chips are the cheap way of doing things. people get their pacemakers and hip implants all the time. but i see biotech as the next big boom. what if the implant is actually biological in origin or uses biological components in their casing. you could use dna from various parasites which can live in the body without detection by the immune system, even directly powering the device from nutrients in the blood stream. then your can have your implanted smart phone, radio augmented telepathy and synaptic backup device. eventually you would bake these devices directly into the human genome. 

Edited September 26, 2020 by Nuke

[Spacescifi]

19 minutes ago, Nuke said:

pretty sure the cell phone thing is a myth, as those frequencies are non-ionizing. and pet rfid chips are the cheap way of doing things. people get their pacemakers and hip implants all the time. but i see biotech as the next big boom. what if the implant is actually biological in origin or uses biological components in their casing. you could use dna from various parasites which can live in the body without detection by the immune system, even directly powering the device from nutrients in the blood stream. then your can have your implanted smart phone, radio augmented telepathy and synaptic backup device. eventually you would bake these devices directly into the human genome. 

 

Sounds a bit better... for me cellphones are still dangerous. Tests have shown that cells are effected by cell phone radiation. You can google it.

Since this generates a lot of money and people can use cellphones relatively safely they are considered safe.

But I still do not believe they pose zero risk. My hand hurts at times after using my data for a while. This won't happen if airplane mode is on.

 

Edited September 26, 2020 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

A cellphone kills a lot of nervous cells.

When it's ringing while you are busy.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Sounds a bit better... for me cellphones are still dangerous. Tests have shown that cells are effected by cell phone radiation. You can google it.

Since this generates a lot of money and people can use cellphones relatively safely they are considered safe.

But I still do not believe they pose zero risk. My hand hurts at times after using my data for a while. This won't happen if airplane mode is on.

 

The only way any EM radiation before the end of the UV side of the spectrum can hurt you is via heating, they cannot knock electrons off of atoms and cause them to become excited. Nor can they penetrate your skin and damage DNA, this isn't just something that's "Told to us" by big corps that we believe on faith. The Photon Energy required to cause these things is well-understood, and solvable mathematically.

As for the latter; the mind is incredibly powerful. This is why we do double-blind, placebo controlled studies; because it's incredibly easy to trick yourself into feeling the effects you believe should be occurring. And then create "Tests" that produce the result you expected to confirm your pre-concieved notions. Also most phones aren't designed to be held for hours, i have big hands and holding any phone makes them hurt (Wireless or no wireless xD). Rectangles really aren't a ergonomic shape for our hands.

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4pxw4tYeCU

This specific video is about 5G, and he goes into a lot more detail about extraneous information (Like cellular repair, cancer etc.). The portion where he begins explaining why even Visible Light (Which is several times more energetic than even the strongest Radio/Microwaves) can't damage DNA begins at 9:50 after he reads a Canadian Study. You can watch the entire video if you want, or not a single second of it. But i feel like putting the information out there regardless.

Edited September 26, 2020 by Incarnation of Chaos

[Spacescifi]

18 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

The only way any EM radiation before the end of the UV side of the spectrum can hurt you is via heating, they cannot knock electrons off of atoms and cause them to become excited. Nor can they penetrate your skin and damage DNA, this isn't just something that's "Told to us" by big corps that we believe on faith. The Photon Energy required to cause these things is well-understood, and solvable mathematically.

As for the latter; the mind is incredibly powerful. This is why we do double-blind, placebo controlled studies; because it's incredibly easy to trick yourself into feeling the effects you believe should be occurring. And then create "Tests" that produce the result you expected to confirm your pre-concieved notions. Also most phones aren't designed to be held for hours, i have big hands and holding any phone makes them hurt (Wireless or no wireless xD). Rectangles really aren't a ergonomic shape for our hands.

  Reveal hidden contents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4pxw4tYeCU

This specific video is about 5G, and he goes into a lot more detail about extraneous information (Like cellular repair, cancer etc.). The portion where he begins explaining why even Visible Light (Which is several times more energetic than even the strongest Radio/Microwaves) can't damage DNA begins at 9:50 after he reads a Canadian Study. You can watch the entire video if you want, or not a single second of it. But i feel like putting the information out there regardless.

 

Well I appreciate your politeness.

Placebo or not (and I tend to think not), I will trust science experiments over some youtube guy who I do not know who's paying him.

/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-studies-link-cell-phone-radiation-with-cancer/

The way I see it, if I am right, then I win out. If I am wrong, I still win, as long phone use is also bad for a host of other reasons.

Also I had a relative who lived on the phone. Found a bengn tumor in her head they took out. Her head was always swollen after the surgery until she died (although not from cancer).

Edited September 26, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Nuke]

20 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Sounds a bit better... for me cellphones are still dangerous. Tests have shown that cells are effected by cell phone radiation. You can google it.

Since this generates a lot of money and people can use cellphones relatively safely they are considered safe.

But I still do not believe they pose zero risk. My hand hurts at times after using my data for a while. This won't happen if airplane mode is on.

 

i dont use smart phones either for entirely different reasons. expense, lock in, binding to expensive data plans, lack of upgrade paths for the firmware, blatant anti-consumerism practices in the cell phone industry, e-waste, the fact that i hate touch screens with a vengeance and don't like to squint, and of course the constant plug in giving everyone in the world the opportunity to bug me. 

as for your hand pain that probably has more to do for lack of ergonomics than a little bit of em radiation. they try to cram as much processing power into as small a form factor as possible and all other concerns go out the window. you either have to crane your neck to use it or hold the phone in an uncomfortably high position. give me a full keyboard and huge screen any day.

[Guest]

On 9/26/2020 at 3:01 AM, Spacescifi said:

Also I had a relative who lived on the phone. Found a bengn tumor in her head they took out. Her head was always swollen after the surgery until she died (although not from cancer).

Confirmation bias, perhaps? Have you considered the entire rest of the people who "live on the phone" yet have no similar ailments?

[The_Arcitect]

On 9/23/2020 at 8:24 PM, Spacescifi said:

Pro: Congrats! They no longer act human, they really do behave different from your average joe or jane.

I would put the pro as: They no longer are effected by intimidation, they also are more likely to things because it must be done.

 

On 9/23/2020 at 8:24 PM, Spacescifi said:

Cons: Eliminate sadness and they no longer can show sympathy or even empathy born of sadness. Eliminate anger and they no longer will feel indignation when evil occurs, and will be more likely to only act in fearful self interest rather than in behalf of protecting those they should care enough to become angry over if anyone or thing hurts them. Eliminate joy and everyone will be sad, mad, or afraid 24/7. Eliminate disgust and there will be no slow escalation to anger, only full on bursts of anger against anything that would normally only cause disgust. Murderous and destructive Klingons basically. Eliminate fear and the death toll goes way up.

I would have word it as: Due to no longer having no emotions, they will act more logically. Depending on what they pick as 'logic', it can be good or bad.  If they use the logic from: "The Prince", they will most likely make the world worse or better for humanity due to "the ends justify the means" idea.  That idea lets this character do horrible thing because it will lead to a better outcome at some point, maybe for the character, maybe for the people, who knows?

[Kernel Kraken]

I think a big "con" of emotionless characters is how much character they lack, ironically. The entire point of them is their lack of emotion and character but that makes them unappealing. I think a better idea is a sociopathic character, say, Hal9000, who has "emotions" but disregards them for decision making. Those characters are truly terrifying, not just generic emotionless drone #2376.

[Spacescifi]

20 minutes ago, Kernel Kraken said:

I think a big "con" of emotionless characters is how much character they lack, ironically. The entire point of them is their lack of emotion and character but that makes them unappealing. I think a better idea is a sociopathic character, say, Hal9000, who has "emotions" but disregards them for decision making. Those characters are truly terrifying, not just generic emotionless drone #2376.

 

Well that is good .

I recently discovered another 'alien' behavior method hidden in plain site.

Animal behavior.

The main thing about animals is that they lack a faculty of right and wrong. They do not understand the difference. They merely know that one way owner is mad, and perhaps they should not do that or else. They also understand and appreciate rewards.

They have no guilty conscience whatsoever, and do not agonize over the past, they are very much creatures who live in the here and now. They don't agonize over the future nor the past, but if you remind them of something in their past or present to be feared, or negative experience, expect them to be nasty toward you assuming they don't flee.

Their sense of right and wrong is no better than a newborn human baby.

Translating this to alien humanoids would be interesting, but not something I would ever encourage readers to aspire to copy...they don'y behave human after all.

That is one method. Another is to give 'aliens' partially instinctual behavior...meaning certain attitudes and actions they simply behave as such and do with little to zero training. Unlike a normal human who needs lots of training but also has complete freedom of his attitudes and behavior choices. Even if making them is hard at times 

Edited November 2, 2020 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

Emotionless characters.

Spoiler

 (  :  ;  P  )

Cats  have perfect sense of right and wrong. The cat is always right. If you are not agreed with cat, you are wrong.

Also there is no "cat owner", there is a "host human".

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, The_Arcitect said:

I would put the pro as: They no longer are effected by intimidation, they also are more likely to things because it must be done.

 

I would have word it as: Due to no longer having no emotions, they will act more logically. Depending on what they pick as 'logic', it can be good or bad.  If they use the logic from: "The Prince", they will most likely make the world worse or better for humanity due to "the ends justify the means" idea.  That idea lets this character do horrible thing because it will lead to a better outcome at some point, maybe for the character, maybe for the people, who knows?

 

I never intended to eliminate all emotions. My point wad that even eliminating one breaks characters bad.