Does Data Feel Emotions? The Intersection of Media Literacy and Science Fiction

 In the TNG Episode Schisms, Data recites a poem to his pet cat, Spot, reproduced here for the sake of ease of reference:

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,

An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;

Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses

Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,

A singular development of cat communications

That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection

For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;

You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.

And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,

It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display

Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.

And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,

I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Throughout the Next Generation, Data and everyone around him seem convinced that Data does not feel emotions, aside from perhaps when he has the emotion chip installed. Yet in this poem, Data expressed several emotions. He says he is intrigued by Spot’s meows - is curiosity not an emotion? It’s by far the one Data expresses the most often - he finds things interesting, intriguing , and fascinating pretty much every episode. He also notes that he pets Spot to demonstrate affection - isn’t the feeling of affection an emotion? He also says he considers Spot a “true and valued” friend. Being able to understand and recognize friendship of this sort seems like, perhaps not an emotion itself, but demonstrating an understanding of emotions deep enough to guarantee Data must have some. Yet he and everyone around him insists he does not.

We also see other instances of Data displaying emotions. At various times he expresses a sense of loss over Tasha Yar’s death. When Data is captured by a collector in The Most Toys, he chooses to shoot the collector after the collector says its a shame Data has no emotions and thus cannot feel rage driving him to kill over the collector having shot another person - although one could argue Data chose to shoot the collector for non-emotional reasons, he is beamed out at the last minute and his disruptor fails to hit the collector, and then when Riker asks about the discharge, he lies and says it must have been a transporter malfunction, which definitely seems to indicate Data feels shame about his actions - another emotion. Data also displays anxiety and confusion when he cannot defeat Kolrami at Strategema, and must be consoled by Counselor Troi. Honestly there is hardly an episode where Data appears that he does not appear to display some emotion, even if it is usually muted or perhaps a different emotion than one might expect.

Now, this could all be dismissed as just, “the writers do not know how to write someone truly emotionless.” Indeed, doing so would probably be quite hard, especially someone like Data who is so very human and who aspires to become moreso. Oh wait, thats another emotion - desire to become human. But I don’t think “the writers made a mistake and meant to write him emotionless and failed” is a terribly interesting take on Data for the same reason I think ignoring all of Data’s clear evidence of emotions throughout the show does not make much sense.

So, does Data actually feel emotions, pre-emotion chip? If we take statements said in the show to be infallible and canon, the answer seems like it can only be no - the show repeatedly tells us he does not. Steve Shives comes to this conclusion in his video on this subject for basically this reason. I, however, come to the opposite conclusion, and the reason why is pretty simple: media literacy. Television shows and fiction more generally are not textbooks: they do not plainly assert facts we are supposed to accept and absorb as true. Rather, they tell stories that we are supposed to interpret, to read between the lines. Thus just because various people on the show say Data cannot feel emotions, does not mean he actually cannot, especially if other things on the show - such as Data’s aforementioned actions and reactions indicate he does feel emotions.

I even think Doctor Soong more or less tells us this when the emotion chip is first introduced. I have not seen the episode in a while, but if I remember correctly he clarifies to Data that Lore was not more perfect as he claimed, but rather that his emotions were too powerful and Lore was unable to manage them, so Data was his attempt to rectify that, to allow him to adjust to the world before he installed the emotion chip to enhance Data’s emotions. I do not actually remember the exact terminology, but the implication to me was the chip would not allow Data to -have- emotions but merely to feel them better, to boost his capacity for feeling and understanding them. This distinction might not make a lot of sense to your average person, but it does to me.

I am not diagnosed autistic, but I am fairly positive that I am - I’ve never been evaluated, but my mom said when I asked her about it that they strongly suspected I was as a kid but refused to get me evaluated to avoid the stigma of a diagnosis. I also experience what is called alexithymia, an inability or difficulty to understand and interpret my own emotions. I still -have- these emotions, and can easily get overwhelmed by them when they are quite powerful, but I cannot easily identify them and often do not notice them until they get to the overwhelming point. I also do not generally express them visibly until that point, and generally the only way I express any and all emotions is crying. I cry when I am sad, I cry when I am angry, I cry when I am happy. Thus, to me, Data reads as essentially processing his emotions the same way - he has them, they affect his behavior, but he is unable to identify them or understand them in the way most people can, until his emotion chip is installed.

Now, do I think the writers were thinking about people with alexithymia when they wrote Data? I mean, probably not, its not a well known condition and was certainly less well known in the 80s, although its possible a writer was writing from personal experience. Do I think they were thinking of autistic people when they wrote Data? That, on the other hand, seems very possible, as there are numerous episodes where he essentially acts as a metaphor for neurodivergence. As Steve Shives often says, its important when interpreting Star Trek (and all media) to remember that it is not about the future, it is about the present. Any and all conclusions we draw about Data should be informed by that - although Data is a robot, we are not supposed to be learning about what robots will be like in the future when Data appears - his stories are meant to tell us something about ourselves. Things like, just because you have a friend who seems cold and emotionless, does not mean they do not feel emotions. Just because someone thinks differently than you, or is more or less bothered by things, or is more naive, or doesn’t understand humor, does not mean they aren’t still fundamentally a person who deserves respect.

I think Data experiences emotions because although the text tells us he does not, it shows us he does, and I also think he experience emotions because the text is more meaningful if he does, if he is read as a metaphor for real life neurodivergent people. The opposite conclusion, that he does not, is simply not an interesting read of the text. The only thing we can draw from that would be “If someday someone invents a robot that seems human in all capacities, ignore any signs it may be developing emotions cuz clearly they are fake.” I just don’t think there is a point in that interpretation? Even if the writers did mean it that way, it is entirely possible, even common, for writers to inject more meaning than they intended into something - many writers are just writing stories, and the themes which arise come about organically, and we should not ignore them just because we doubt the writers had ever heard of alexithymia or were thinking about autistic people. Also I kinda buried the lede, because Star Trek Picard establishes Data loves Picard *mic drop* (although thats post emotion chip but whatever)