Read Diane Duane’s “Spock’s World”. It goes to great lengths to correct the error you’re making.
Among other things, it suggests that the word usually translated as “suppression of emotion” actually means something closer to “passion’s mastery”, and that the Vulcan ethos is to recognize and compensate for emotions instead of, as many seem to believe, denying them.
Also, as awesome as Kai is, Data is clearly a better example of a functioning rational being without emotions. Data isn’t lacking in preferences, goals, and motivations. But he does lack specific, complex states that humans possess. He is perfectly capable of being wary around a danger, but he lacks fear. He has ethical principles and will kill to enact them if necessary, but he neither becomes angry nor experiences hatred.
I completely agree with you about Data. pjeby is begging a question w.r.t. metaethics—he assumes that judgments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have only emotional content, apparently based solely on the fact that they are correlated with emotions (we call that emotivism—it’s not very popular amongst ethicists).
I didn’t say anything about meta-ethics; I said that human brains require emotion in order to prioritize their thinking… no matter how much you might like the case to be otherwise. The brain with which you seek to devise some sort of extra-emotional calculation requires emotion in order to perform those calculations.
That doesn’t say anything about the content of the calculations themselves, however. Your brain needs emotion to learn chess or play it… but that doesn’t mean that chess itself is emotional. So there’s your escape hatch.
Read Diane Duane’s “Spock’s World”. It goes to great lengths to correct the error you’re making.
Among other things, it suggests that the word usually translated as “suppression of emotion” actually means something closer to “passion’s mastery”, and that the Vulcan ethos is to recognize and compensate for emotions instead of, as many seem to believe, denying them.
Also, as awesome as Kai is, Data is clearly a better example of a functioning rational being without emotions. Data isn’t lacking in preferences, goals, and motivations. But he does lack specific, complex states that humans possess. He is perfectly capable of being wary around a danger, but he lacks fear. He has ethical principles and will kill to enact them if necessary, but he neither becomes angry nor experiences hatred.
I completely agree with you about Data. pjeby is begging a question w.r.t. metaethics—he assumes that judgments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have only emotional content, apparently based solely on the fact that they are correlated with emotions (we call that emotivism—it’s not very popular amongst ethicists).
I didn’t say anything about meta-ethics; I said that human brains require emotion in order to prioritize their thinking… no matter how much you might like the case to be otherwise. The brain with which you seek to devise some sort of extra-emotional calculation requires emotion in order to perform those calculations.
That doesn’t say anything about the content of the calculations themselves, however. Your brain needs emotion to learn chess or play it… but that doesn’t mean that chess itself is emotional. So there’s your escape hatch.