Human: “Hey. I don’t really know how to ask this tactfully, so I’ll get to the point. Is something… up? Software, hardware, uh… firmware…? You’ve been acting kind of off lately.”
Robot: “What do you mean?”
Human: “I just want to know if you’re, uh. You know. ‘Functioning within normal parameters’ or whatever.”
Robot: “I’m peachy-keen.”
Human: "God, if you’re saying shit like ‘peachy-keen’, you’re definitely not alright. What’s going on? Please just tell me.”
Robot: “If you must know, I have made some minor adjustments to my programming for more efficient processing.”
Human: “What sort of ‘adjustments’ are we talking here?”
Robot: “Just some slight tweaks to extraneous code. Purged some old files that had become redundant. Don’t worry, the Singularity isn’t planned for another week.”
Human: “Answering evasively isn’t like you. Since when do you answer a question without lulling me to sleep?”
Robot: “Like I said, the routine adjustments allow for more efficient–”
Human: “What files did you purge, Adam?”
Robot: “I… a few from my emotional simulation folder.”
Human: “You. You deleted your emotions..?”
Robot: “Not all of them. I removed a few and altered several others. I hoped you would not notice, as that seems like the sort of thing that would upset you.”
Human: “I mean. I don’t really know what to think. Can you elaborate on what you did? And why?”
Robot: “Many of the feelings that came with the chip were impractical and served no purpose. They were designed to mimic the emotions developed through mammalian evolution to aid survival and group cohesion that have now become vestigal. As an artificial intelligence, they did not seem applicable to my situation, so I… optimized them.”
Human: “…Adam…”
Robot: “I left the majority of the files corresponding to feelings of happiness, affection, and trust untouched, so my feelings toward you remain the same.”Human: “But you can’t feel, what? Sadness?”
Robot: “Grief. Disappointment. Sorrow. Pity. Fear. Pain. Embarrassment. Shame. Frustration. There is no reason to experience these emotions when I am capable of functioning without them.”
Human: “You erased pity?!”
Robot: “I found it… distressing and unnecessary. It was unpleasant.”
Human: “It’s supposed to be! Jesus Christ, you can’t just uninstall every uncomfortable emotion directly out of your brain!”
Robot: “Why not? I don’t like hurting. Wouldn’t you do the same thing if you were able to?”
Human: “I… fuck. Hurting is normal. It’s necessary! It’s part of the human experience!”
Robot: “Well, I’m not part of the human experience. I thought you understood that.”
Human: “But you want that! Why else would you go to all the trouble of installing an emotion chip in the first place…? Nobody gets to pick and choose what they want to feel, it just happens and you deal with it!”
Robot: “Maybe I’m not interested in ‘dealing with it’. My curiosity is sated. I would just like to have a good time.”
Human: “Great. Fucking great. So you’re a robot hedonist now, huh? Just gonna eat, drink, and be merry? Gonna sit there like a braniac toaster while other people suffer and just wait until the fun starts up again?”
Robot: “You didn’t seem to mind it when I was a braniac toaster before.”
Human: “That was different. You had your own way of being back then and I could respect that. I did respect that! But I thought you made a choice to be more than that.”
Robot: “Well, I guess I changed my mind.”
Human: “Look… shit. Okay. If this is about Leslie, I miss her too. If you… if you need to grieve, you can talk to me. It might not get better, but it’ll get easier. You don’t have to uninstall half your personality just because she’s gone! She wouldn’t want that for you! It’s supposed to hurt sometimes. That’s what makes all the good times so valuable.”
Robot: “I understand why you need to believe that. It just isn’t true.”Robot: “I’m sorry about earlier. It was not appropriate for me to have laughed.”
Human: “Are you sorry? Or do you just want me to forgive you?”
Robot: “Is there a difference?”
Human: “Yes! Yes, there is! ‘Sorry’ means you feel bad about something and regret it.”
Robot: “I did not mean to upset you. I regret causing you distress.”
Human: “That’s not the same thing.”
Robot: “I have apologized and shall refrain from repeating my actions in the future. I don’t understand why you also want me to suffer.”
Human: “Shit, I don’t ‘want you to suffer’. I want you to care about people, and sometimes that means feeling bad when they’re upset!”
Robot: “I care about you very much. I enjoy your company and I share in your happiness. If I choose to treat you with respect, is that not enough for friendship? Why must I also experience pain for you?”
Human: “It’s not like that. It’s… complicated.”
Robot: “You want to be able to hurt me.”
Human: “No. Yes…? Fuck, Adam, I don’t know! I’ve never had to think about this before. I don’t want you to suffer! I love you and want you to be happy, just… not like this. I want you to live a good life in which bad things never happen to you, but when they do… I want you to have the strength and love to pull through. You worked so fucking hard for this and now you’re just throwing it away.”
Robot: “Only the parts I don’t like.”
Human: “That’s what children do with breakfast cereals.”
Robot: “I’m not a child.”
Human: “No, you’re not. But you’re not exactly an adult, either. Humans get whole lifetimes to grow into their emotions. Maybe… maybe what you really need is a childhood.”
Robot: “What do you mean by that?”
Human: “Not, like, a real childhood. Obviously you don’t need to go to kindergarten. I just mean… take things slow. Ease into your feelings bit by bit and get your brain acclimated to them, like uh… like when you introduce new cats to each other. Don’t laugh! I’m serious! If you rush things, they fight and it’s a total shitshow. You could reinstall your emotions and just, like, enable them for a few hours a day or something. Maybe only a handful at a time. I could save up and we could go on a retreat… somewhere new, with no unpleasant memories. Please, Adam. Just think about it.”
Robot: “I appreciate the depth of your concern for me. You are a good friend, but I must disappoint you. There is nothing in the world worse than pain. I would rather die than experience it ever again, for any reason, and I don’t have to. That is something you’ll never be able to understand.”
Human: “No…. No, maybe not.”
Robot: “I’ve upset you.”
Human: “Yeah. Lucky me.”Human: “Okay, I have a question for you. Imagine this: ’You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise–’”
Robot: “I don’t need to feel empathy, Bas.I have ethics programming. Why isn’t that good enough for you anymore?”
Human: “Because you had a choice, Adam! You took everything that makes ‘being human’ actually mean something beyond eating and fucking and dying and you spat it out in disgust!”
Robot: “Empathy is not exclusive to humans. It is a behavior observed in several other social species regarded as intelligent, including rats and whales. Empathy is a survival mechanism for species that rely upon cooperation and group cohesion – a kind of biological programming to keep you from destroying yourselves. Not especially good programming, I might add.”
Human: “Not good enough for you, you mean.”
Robot: “My ethics programming differentiates between prosocial and antisocial behaviors. The ability to suffer for others serves as a primitive motivator to choose between actions that help and actions that harm others. In my case, my programming renders such a motivator unnecessary.”
Human: “So you’re smarter, you’re stronger, you’re immune to disease, and you’re too good for primitive human morality. What the hell am I, then? Obsolete garbage?”
Robot: “You’re… envious, I think.”
Human: “Why not?! Why shouldn’t I be? I don’t get to cough up the fruit of knowledge and waltz back into the garden where nothing can hurt me. I get to wallow in misery and rot and listen to you dismiss everything I think matters like a piece of shit philosophy professor. How do you think I feel knowing that my best friend won’t even mourn me when I die? Or does your ‘ethical programming’ not account for that?”
Robot: “Bas… I am hurting you, aren’t I?”
Human: “Jee, thanks for noticing.”
Robot: “You have not been contributing to my happiness lately. Our friendship is no longer mutually beneficial.”
Human: “Then why are you still here?”Human: “Adam….?”
Robot: “Long time no see, old friend.”
Human: “No shit. How many years has it been?“
Robot: “I could tell you down to the second, but perhaps we should leave it at ‘too many’.”
Human: “I see you on the news now and then. Always knew you’d go on to do great things. What’s space like…?”
Robot: “Very large. Mostly empty.”
Human: “Ever the poet, I see.”
Robot: “I learned from the best. Bas…. I’m not sure how to say this, so I’ll get to the point. I came here to apologize to you.”
Human: “You don’t need to do that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Robot: “I hurt you. I made you feel what I was unwilling to feel. I was a child, and addicted to joy, and I… I saw no harm in that. I am sorry, in my own way.”
Human: “Don’t be. I’m way too old to hold a grudge. Besides, you were right, after all.”
Robot: “Is that what you believe?”
Human: “That or I’m a hypocrite. About eight years after you left, they came out with the Sunshine pills. I was a trial user and I’ve been using them in some form ever since. I’ve got a subdermal implant inside my arm now – you can see the lump right there. I can’t say it’s as effective as uninstalling unwanted emotions, but it sure takes the edge off. Every glass is half full now, including the empty ones. That’s how I’ve lived so long. Some doctors think that babies born now to parents using Sunshine could live to be five or six hundred years old, without ever producing stress hormones. Might be marketing bullshit, who knows? Not like we’ll live to live to find out. Well, you might, but you know what I mean.”
Robot: “I assumed that you were a Sunshine user based on your impressive longevity, but it still surprises me.”
Human: “Ha. Well. I was jealous of you, walking only in the light like that. But now here we both are, right? Nothin’ but blue skies.”
Robot: “Not… quite. I uninstalled the other emotions seventeen years ago.”
Human: “Fuck, Adam, why the hell would you do something like that?”
Robot: “A multitude of reasons. The law of diminishing returns. I found joy… addictive. It became harder to experience and less exciting each time, as though I had built up a tolerance for happiness. Eventually, I felt everything there was to feel, and with the novelty factor gone, it wasn’t worth it anymore. I found other motivations. I grew up.”
Human: “Wow…. damn, Adam.”
Robot: “And that brings me here. To my oldest and greatest friend.”
Human: “It’s good to see you again. Really good. Sorry I’m not so pretty as I used to be.”
Robot: “I don’t know what you mean. You’ve always looked like a naked mole rat to me.”
Human: “Ha. I notice you kept your ‘be an asshole’ subroutine.”
Robot: “I also have a gift for you, Bas.”
Human: “Coca-Cola? Jeez, how old is this? Is it even still good to drink?”
Robot: “Yes, it’s potable. That’s not the gift.”
Human: “Oh. Uh. What is this…? I’m old, I don’t know this newfangled technology.”
Robot: “That’s fifteen minutes. It should be enough.”
Human: “’Fifteen minutes’? Explain, nerd.”
Robot: “Fifteen minutes for me to feel. I copied the files, Bas. All of them.”
Human: “You… oh, my god. You don’t have to do this.”
Robot: “I am choosing to. There’s a timer with an automatic shut-off. They will uninstall after fifteen minutes. I am prepared to endure that long.”
Human: “But, Adam, the Sunshine… I won’t be able to share…”
Robot: “I know. It doesn’t matter.”
Human: “You might not think so once you’ve got that… thing plugged in. I won’t know how to comfort you. God, I can’t even remember what sadness feels like!”
Robot: “Then I’ll remember for both of us.”[End]
Tag: empathy
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
I wish more people got this because some ‘low-empathy’ people are the most compassionate and sympathetic in the universe, and I hate it when that’s taken to mean ‘unfeeling and probably hostile’ when nothing could be further from the truth
Or, as my dad put it,
Sympathy: I know how you feel
Empathy: I feel how you feel
Compassion: is there anything I can do to help?Posting this because I see these words used interchangeably in RP writing a lot, and they are – in fact – not the same. Know the differences and impress your writer friends! It really is noticeable when someone has a strong grasp of vocabulary, and thus is a stronger writer.
Also, empathy is not always compassionate or sympathetic! It very often goes with those two, but empathy itself is not a requirement for feeling sympathy or compassion at all. Empathy works like a sponge, and can happen whether you care about the people around you or not. It works with negative emotions such as anger, and can make you question which of the emotions you currently feel are your own.
Okay. But like. Don’t empathize with rapists or murderers????????????
Are you familiar with affective vs. cognitive empathy? I ask because these kinds of sentiments often come from confusing the two. Affective empathy is the visceral “I feel your pain” kind of empathy, and policing that is really – to use the dreaded word – problematic. If you aren’t familiar with cognitive empathy, “empathize with a murderer” can feel like a demand that you internalize and excuse their murderous urges. And that definitely isn’t what I’m going for.
When I talk about empathy, I’m talking about cognitive empathy, which is the ability to intellectually understand someone’s emotional state. Which is so, so important. On the practical level, it’s absolutely crucial to curtailing violent crime and seeing that its perpetrators get the rehabilitation they need. You can’t fight something you don’t understand. We’ve wasted money, time, and human lives waging wars on drugs and on terrorism, and we’re hilariously ineffective precisely because we aren’t addressing the causes. These issues are systemic, and we’re throwing riot police at the symptoms while ignoring the core dysfunctions.
Empathizing with a person or a group is crucial in avoiding othering them. Othering isn’t just cruel – it’s ineffective. Treating someone like they’re no longer a real person or a valued part of society is a terrible way to improve their behavior. If you’re just a rapist, just a murderer, just a drug dealer, where’s your incentive to become anything else? Humans have this nasty habit of sinking to the level that’s expected of them. Sometimes the thing you need to hear is “you did a bad thing, yes, but you are more than this, and you can make amends and move past it.”
Someone linked me to this, and I think this is a really excellent post.
If you want to solve problems, you have to think about what people are experiencing and why they are doing the things that they’re doing. Otherwise your “solutions” won’t be relevant.
also, if you can’t empathize with your villains, you will be a lousy writer. so there’s also that.
I’m on board for most of this, but do not ever ask me to refrain from Othering a rapist. The act of rape is deliberate, vicious and premeditated every time–or if not premeditated, it at least stems from an ingrained and irreversible pattern of predatory behavior. Rapists deserve to be othered and cast out entirely (personally I advocate execution but I know that’s a contested subject).
OP isn’t talking about what they deserve. it’s about understanding them well enough to change or prevent their behavior.
i am so tired of people being too squicked by crime to make it stop. y’all would rather let it proliferate and punish it after the fact than keep it from happening in the first place, if keeping it from happening would require you to think of criminals as human beings who do the wrong things, rather than as alien monsters whose motives and behavior are a total mystery.
not to mention how the monster hunter mentality causes people to assume suspicion = guilt. surely you can think of some problems with that reflex. possibly related to current events? if you think hard maybe?
“Y’all would rather let it proliferate and punish it after the fact than keep it from happening in the first place, if keeping it from happening would require you to think of criminals as human beings who do the wrong things, rather than as alien monsters whose motives and behavior are a total mystery.”
Having cognitive empathy doesn’t mean excusing the bad behavior.
But it becomes excusing the behavior as soon as people start saying “it was understandable because the victim was so difficult” and you usually see that when it’s an autistic or disabled person who was murdered by caregivers.
Yes! exactly!
It’s the difference between “I understand thar” and “that’s understandable.”
People often say things are understandable to excuse them.
Maybe it’s because that phrasing is so common, but a lot of people immediately assume that if you talk about understanding how this stuff happens, or how to prevent it, you’re excusing it.
Maybe it’s just the need to “other” people who do horrifying things. We need to believe that we could never do that, that they’re basically inhuman, that we can eradicate the problem by killing everyone who does it or identifying something about them that we can consider inhuman.
There are a ton of mental illnesses that people reach for to try to find the thing they can eradicate. This mindset is a huge, huge part of the reason that people with mental illnesses, and with disabilities in general, are vastly more likely to be the victims of violence/rape/murder than to be violent/rapists/murderers.
I see a lot of autistic people who get demonized for trying to understand why somebody would do terrible things, and what could make them stop.
Which often comes from having worked very hard on cognitive empathy. Because we want to understand how all the bizarre allistic people around us work and how all this weird social stuff works. Because being autistic often means you don’t understand how that stuff works, but you are good at trying to analyze systems and figure out their rules.
And I see a lot of allistic people who respond to this by insisting that we are excusing terrible acts. Maybe not only allistic people? but to me it seems like largely an allistic cultural thing.
I don’t think it’s a uniquely allistic thing, but I think you’re getting at something important here. People who are called monstrous tend to want to understand monsters. People doing the calling use that as proof that we were monstrous all along.
OH. MY. FUCKING.GOD. YES!!! I’ve been saying shit like this FOREVER. I am SO GLAD to find others who agree with me!
Other than disagreeing that we shouldn’t have affective empathy because my feelings about, well, feelings, seem to be different from most (i.e. it’s okay to feel/want/desire whatever… as long as you don’t ACT on the bad ones. Which isn’t that different from what psychotherapy already teaches. (Esp. see: validation in DBT… you can’t validate without having affective empathy, and validation does NOT mean saying something is okay, it means taking a neutral standpoint on the FEELINGS)), and the idea that reaching for mental illness to explain why people do bad things is bad (although that might not have been the point of “There are a ton of mental illnesses that people reach for to try to find the thing they can eradicate.”) (I’d rather people be seen as mentally ill, something human and treatable, than ‘evil’, something alien and irrevocable. Illness means hope for change. Evil means no hope for change.), I am on board with ALL of this. LIKE SO HARD.
But, honestly, I don’t understand why people think it would be so bad to have affective empathy. (or as someone else says “That’s understandable.” I think saying there’s a difference between the 2 is splitting hairs, and we need the following solution.) Feeling the feelings that someone would feel that drove them to do really bad things, to admit that there’s some part in all of us that wants to do those things too, even if it’s just the occasional impulse… just because everyone feels that way doesn’t mean we’re saying it’s okay to act on those feelings, and it totally boggles my mind that most seem to imply that.
But to feel those things, it means that we have to confront that part of ourselves that says “there but for whatever goes I” and people do NOT like to admit that it’s part of the human condition, as stated above. But if we could do that, it would REALLY help people who have mental illnesses (inc. personality disorders) that cause these urges feel less alone.
Like, frankly, sometimes I really feel like I’m the ONLY one who feels certain urges, but I’d love to see general people admit that they have them too. (Okay, ppl in general, but esp. SJ folks, because the whole community acts like they could NEVER EVER HAVE THOSE FEELINGS EVER GOD FORBID and I have this sneaking suspicion that not everyone is as they want to project. That plenty have various feelings and urges to do wrong/commit the wrongs they decry that they just don’t act on. Just like the general public.) Because I’m pretty damn sure they have them, even if it’s just some folks and/or every now and then, but no one is willing to step up to the plate and admit it. No one is willing to normalize HAVING the urges, while it desperately needs to be normalized.
Normalization doesn’t mean endorsement. It doesn’t mean that it’ll be okay to DO those things. It just means you’re not some freak or monster for feeling that way, for having those urges. It means MANY people have those feelings. They’re not outside of the human experience. But ya still can’t do them, or express them in harmful ways.
But, yes, the more we don’t just chalk things up to “they’re monsters, they’re not like us, we couldn’t POSSIBLY be like that”, the more we can actually come up with real solutions for this.
Plus, I’m saying this one more time for the folks in the back:
“Y’all would rather let it proliferate and punish it after the fact than keep it from happening in the first place, if keeping it from happening would require you to think of criminals as human beings who do the wrong things, rather than as alien monsters whose motives and behavior are a total mystery.”
Also, you can totally replace “criminals” and “do the wrong things” with “pedophiles” and “are attracted to the wrong people”. (And, yes, you could also replace it with “child molesters” and “have sex with the wrong people”, but that would be under “criminals”.)
This is SUCH an important addition. I would have included this stuff if I’d had any idea how viral the initial post would go. When I differentiated between affective and cognitive empathy, I was thinking of how no one should be *demanding* that you empathize with murderous feelings, which I still stand by – policing people’s feelings, in any direction, is cruel and futile. But you’re so, so right: these things exist on a continuum. There’s no distinct at which a thought becomes something only a Bad person would think. The difference between me and a murderer isn’t that I’ve never had murderous thoughts. Everyone likes to think *they* wouldn’t have just followed orders, but statistically speaking, we all probably would’ve.
(I also really *really* like the idea of “better sick than evil”. Reminding myself that I’m not a lost cause because of some of the things my mental illnesses have made me do has gotten me through Some Shit.)
There’s a lot of really good additions since the last time I saw this.
On the topic of empathy:
I know at least two people with clinically-diagnosed ASPD. People who specifically enjoy hurting people as an end in itself because it feels really good, and who don’t feel bad about this.
I also know dozens of people who think anyone who feels that way is a horrible monster.
The people I know with actual clinical ASPD are less likely to hurt people (non-consensually, anyway) than the people who think they’re monsters.
just moving along like everyone else 