Zompist Bboard Again

Something I've been thinking about for a while related to fictional alien species and emotions:

In SF and sci-fi settings, you sometimes get alien species that have no emotions, or have emotions but repress them, like Star Trek's Vulcans. But when aliens have emotions and express them, it's pretty much always human-like emotions - love, hate, anger, sadness, fear, etc. So there are basically the two options No (or repressed) Emotions, and Human or Human-Like Emotions.

What I've never seen, but what IMO might be quite interesting, is a fictional alien species whose main emotions would be something like tuznrt, jhădbinr, gsedbölf, ztésbr, and bnulǣ, with none of those directly corresponding to any of the major human emotions. That might be pretty difficult to pull off well, though.

So, could that be done? Has it, perhaps, already been done in some work I haven't heard of yet? Or are the basic human emotions so fundamentally connected to the basic needs of all living things that it would be implausible? (I tried something like that in an unfinished SF project of mine as a teenager back in the late 1990s, but I didn't get far.)

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 3:14 pm Something I've been thinking about for a while related to fictional alien species and emotions:

In SF and sci-fi settings, you sometimes get alien species that have no emotions, or have emotions but repress them, like Star Trek's Vulcans. But when aliens have emotions and express them, it's pretty much always human-like emotions - love, hate, anger, sadness, fear, etc. So there are basically the two options No (or repressed) Emotions, and Human or Human-Like Emotions.

Although I like Star Trek, this never made much sense to me because emotions are basically just the motivations we have to act. Completely suppressing your emotions would leave you without a reason to do much at all. I actually found the Vulcans of Star Trek: Enterprise more realistic precisely because they're depicted as somewhat hypocritical. The calm surface hides the same faults that everyone else has.

What I've never seen, but what IMO might be quite interesting, is a fictional alien species whose main emotions would be something like tuznrt, jhădbinr, gsedbölf, ztésbr, and bnulǣ, with none of those directly corresponding to any of the major human emotions. That might be pretty difficult to pull off well, though.

So, could that be done? Has it, perhaps, already been done in some work I haven't heard of yet? Or are the basic human emotions so fundamentally connected to the basic needs of all living things that it would be implausible? (I tried something like that in an unfinished SF project of mine as a teenager back in the late 1990s, but I didn't get far.)

I think the basic ones are. I struggle to see how creatures intelligent and individual enough to speak something like a human language wouldn't feel some kind of instinct for self preservation, which probably means feeling something like fear. Equally, if the beings are sexual, they're probably going to have a built-in urge to procreate that you might call lust. If they're subject to competition for resources or have loyalty to the group, they're going to have enemies and "hate" them.

Since language is fundamentally social in nature, I'd assume these aliens have some kind of society, which means they're going to feel stronger bonds to those socially closer to them. Whether that's "love" in the human sense is questionable, but some form of pairwise bonding separate from the bond to the group as a whole seems likely. Of course, you could have alien ants, but would they really speak something like a human language?

I'm reminded of the fact that, just as I've rarely ever seen alien life forms more alien than life on earth, I've rarely seen alien societies more alien than other human societies.

I remember reading another endless installment in the Sapir-Whorf debate some years concerning a people of Melanesia or Micronesia who lacked words for "sad" or "depressed". They still experienced reactions that we would describe in those terms--they still felt listless after a tragic event, such as the loss of a loved one--but these reactions simply weren't classified as characterising a distinct emotion of "sadness". This seems to me distinct from "repressing all emotions" or even feeling "sadness" and repressing it.

There's a lot of cultural conditioning that occurs between experiencing a particular emotional reaction and expressing an emotion. It's never as simple as "express or repress". For instance, I came from a background where anger was a more acceptable emotion for men to express than many others, such as loneliness or fear. So when you saw some react with "anger", you had to do some decoding to figure out what it stemmed from (and, therefore, what response was called for).

Lastly, the psychology of emotions is complex. Usually there are a combination of emotional reactions to a particular stimulus. I can see a culture having a name (and an independent concept) for something we consider a mixture--like, for instance, a word for "a mix of anger and fear" or "an angry reaction born of fear" but not for "anger" apart from fear. So, for instance, the common Western reaction of anger in the face of frustration (say at not being able to fix a computer bug) would be baffling to them. How can you be angryfraid at something that can't harm you?

ETA: Here's an older paper that delves into the subject, with many specific examples: https://www2.bc.edu/james-russell/publi ... ll1991.pdf. It seems most likely that the culture I had in mind was Tahiti. There are also interesting accounts of both Asian and African cultures where "anger" and "sadness" are not clearly distinguished.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 4:58 pm I'm reminded of the fact that, just as I've rarely ever seen alien life forms more alien than life on earth, I've rarely seen alien societies more alien than other human societies.

Yes, I admit that other human cultures name and segment the emotional spectrum differently. But I think there's a universal structure to the space. Having a basic term angryfraid makes some sense, but having happyfraid as the basic term for the happy and afraid parts of the spectrum seems downright odd. There are functional overlaps between anger and fear, but it's not obvious that happiness and fear have much in common at all. There is being afraid to lose something that makes you happy, but if you feel this strongly you normally cease to be happy as a consequence.

Thank you both for the feedback!

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 4:58 pm I'm reminded of the fact that, just as I've rarely ever seen alien life forms more alien than life on earth, I've rarely seen alien societies more alien than other human societies.

I think several conlangers have tried to collect as many human linguistic universals as possible, and then tried to come up with conlangs that violated as many of those as possible. Has anyone ever tried a conculture version of that?

Since chris_notts mentioned Star Trek: Enterprise, I think I remember a scene from one episode of that show where some aliens were offended that their human contacts had eaten in their presence, because their species didn't do that in front of others. That makes me think that it is fairly interesting that pretty much every human culture I've heard of treats eating at least sometimes as a pretty big deal or even a major social event, and there doesn't seem to be any human culture that treats eating the way Western cultures usually treat the other end of the digestive process.

I remember reading another endless installment in the Sapir-Whorf debate some years concerning a people of Melanesia or Micronesia who lacked words for "sad" or "depressed". They still experienced reactions that we would describe in those terms--they still felt listless after a tragic event, such as the loss of a loved one--but these reactions simply weren't classified as characterising a distinct emotion of "sadness". This seems to me distinct from "repressing all emotions" or even feeling "sadness" and repressing it.

As Justin B. Rye once put it, before the 20th century human beings had no word for "genocide", either, and that didn't stop them from occasionally committing it.

Lastly, the psychology of emotions is complex. Usually there are a combination of emotional reactions to a particular stimulus. I can see a culture having a name (and an independent concept) for something we consider a mixture--like, for instance, a word for "a mix of anger and fear" or "an angry reaction born of fear" but not for "anger" apart from fear. So, for instance, the common Western reaction of anger in the face of frustration (say at not being able to fix a computer bug) would be baffling to them. How can you be angryfraid at something that can't harm you?

That's a very interesting idea!

ETA: Here's an older paper that delves into the subject, with many specific examples: https://www2.bc.edu/james-russell/publi ... ll1991.pdf. It seems most likely that the culture I had in mind was Tahiti. There are also interesting accounts of both Asian and African cultures where "anger" and "sadness" are not clearly distinguished.

Fascinating!

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 5:51 pmThat makes me think that it is fairly interesting that pretty much every human culture I've heard of treats eating at least sometimes as a pretty big deal or even a major social event, and there doesn't seem to be any human culture that treats eating the way Western cultures usually treat the other end of the digestive process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLw5P2Yk4mo

I think if you introduce a new emotion unlike any "human" ones, it would become a pretty big part of the story. Emotions are usually pretty key to how readers understand what's happening in a story, so it can't be changed casually. You'd need to explain the new emotion and demonstrate it, and if you're going to do all that it probably needs to have some significance to the plot or character growth. So introducing several alien emotions simultaneously would dominate the whole story, turning it into a single "what-if" scenario, like Native Tongue with linguistic determinism. I'm not aware of any stories that do this (although Ursula K LeGuin comes close in some of her stories, like The Word for World is Forest, where the natives learn what greed, rancor, and vengeance are from human interlopers), but it would be fun to see.

Confession time. I once wrote a short story (lost in a randsomware attack years ago) about humans discovering a sentient species that doesn't at first seem sentient because they are so different from humans. They focused on smell far more than sight or sound, for example. One of the what-if premises was that emotional complexity and seeming irrationality correlates with intelligence, and so the humans start to suspect that the creatures are intelleigent when they notice that suicide is one of their major causes of death despite having plenty of food and companionship. It's probably for the best that it was corrupted...

I think C J Cherryh's Foreigner books do a fair bit of that, the atevi having very different emotions from humans.

Your story doesn't sound that bad! I might have enjoyed it.

One thing people often seem to go for is hierarchy. Aliens are give a stronger pack mentality and a strong instinct to establish a pecking order to make them seem more different from humans, with a lower emphasis on love-like emotions in favour of submission and domination. This also commonly goes along with dueling at thr drop of a hat, often to the death. How advanced aliens subject to such constant in-group fighting for dominance could really be is an interesting question.

Some examples
- Klingons, at least in the military
- The Coldi from the Ambassador books by Patty Jensen
- A number of examples from C. J. Cherryh, including The Faded Sun trilogy IIRC

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2020 3:31 am I think C J Cherryh's Foreigner books do a fair bit of that, the atevi having very different emotions from humans.

You beat me to it!

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 5:51 pm
I think several conlangers have tried to collect as many human linguistic universals as possible, and then tried to come up with conlangs that violated as many of those as possible. Has anyone ever tried a conculture version of that?

Not by a conlanger, but see here: https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyph ... nivers.htm

I think this was posted by somebody on the forum in another thread recently.

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2020 3:31 am I think C J Cherryh's Foreigner books do a fair bit of that, the atevi having very different emotions from humans.

Thank you! I just read parts of the Wikipedia entry. Interesting!

Curlyjimsam wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2020 5:24 am

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 5:51 pm
I think several conlangers have tried to collect as many human linguistic universals as possible, and then tried to come up with conlangs that violated as many of those as possible. Has anyone ever tried a conculture version of that?

Not by a conlanger, but see here: https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyph ... nivers.htm

I think this was posted by somebody on the forum in another thread recently.

Thank you!

Just returned my rental car to Utrecht today. Funnily enough, while I've had my Luxembourgish driver's license for almost five years now, this was the first time I used it to drive in Europe. Took a bit to get used to the smaller roads and a few idiosyncrasies, like the priority on the right rule and the generally higher speed limits compared to the US, but overall quite pleasant... though the petrol prices in the Nether regions Netherlands have given me no great desire to get a car here.

I just wanted to say I used to frequent the ZBB and CBB and all of the satellite sections many moons ago. I used to be known as Helios or Zontas (among other accounts). These days, tho, I find both names kind of like deadnames to me.

I'm really heartwarmed to see almost everyone is still here all these years later and honestly seem nicer to boot. Maybe I'm just most more mature or time has given us all the patience. I started going to the ZBB at age 13-14, and now I'm 22. Nine years and still no conlangs or fluency in another language haha.

I also see the KneeQuickie is being culled. I don't wanna necropost, because I don't know the protocol for that sort of thing, so let me just say RIP, even tho I have mostly been a minor figure in the community at best. I feel like not much has changed in general, but the stuff that has always gets me. Rest in peace, Neekwiki. I'll never forget you.
----

Sentimentalism aside, I kind of wish in a weird way there was a city or town where boats were the dominant mode of transportation, and the place was built on water. I don't think creating such a place is good for the environment or anyone's health, but something about quiet and/ or sunny maritime places vibes with me. This sprang to mind, cause of Dr. Shark's realization about a lack of a need to drive.

I kind of wish in a weird way there was a city or town where boats were the dominant mode of transportation, and the place was built on water. I don't think creating such a place is good for the environment or anyone's health, but something about quiet and/ or sunny maritime places vibes with me. This sprang to mind, cause of Dr. Shark's realization about a lack of a need to drive.

The closest ideas you mention that immediately come to mind are Venice (built on a lagoon) and Amsterdam, and, well...

...but, yeah, this was the first time since moving to Europe that I've driven/needed to drive. And if things hadn't taken a turn like they did, I wouldn't have: a friend was supposed to help me move up to the Netherlands, where we'd drive up together, he'd dump my stuff, and then he'd run away (after visiting a few coffee shops, more than likely). The problem came in that, due to the coronavirus situation, while it turned out I could cross the border, he was not allowed to (nor could we even be in the same car, according to Luxembourg transit rules!), so I just chose to drive myself since it seemed to be the easiest and cheapest option given the situation. Even with petrol at €1.40/liter. (Seriously, I paid €0.89/liter in Luxembourg!)

doctor shark wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2020 4:05 am The closest ideas you mention that immediately come to mind are Venice (built on a lagoon) and Amsterdam, and, well...

Wismar in Germany is also full of canals, but the only European town I can think of where the *only* transport available is by boat is Giethoorn in Overijssel.

You also have the example of boat cities on inland lakes (like Tonle Sap in Cambodia) or with floating components (like in historical Lake Texcoco in Mexico).

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 3:14 pm Something I've been thinking about for a while related to fictional alien species and emotions:

In SF and sci-fi settings, you sometimes get alien species that have no emotions, or have emotions but repress them, like Star Trek's Vulcans. But when aliens have emotions and express them, it's pretty much always human-like emotions - love, hate, anger, sadness, fear, etc. So there are basically the two options No (or repressed) Emotions, and Human or Human-Like Emotions.

What I've never seen, but what IMO might be quite interesting, is a fictional alien species whose main emotions would be something like tuznrt, jhădbinr, gsedbölf, ztésbr, and bnulǣ, with none of those directly corresponding to any of the major human emotions. That might be pretty difficult to pull off well, though.

So, could that be done? Has it, perhaps, already been done in some work I haven't heard of yet? Or are the basic human emotions so fundamentally connected to the basic needs of all living things that it would be implausible? (I tried something like that in an unfinished SF project of mine as a teenager back in the late 1990s, but I didn't get far.)

You know, the pon farr thing was kind of embarassing, but it felt like a better attempt at alien emotion that Mr Spock's philosophy.

More seriously though... I believe that it's possible and should be tried; and in fact I tried just that with the Bugs (I should get back to them sometime!). They do have different emotions than we do; for instance the bond between worker and queen; colony solidarity; the particular feeling induced by other's -- or own's own antisocial behaviour, the cyclical attraction-repulsion towards male Bugs.
Some basic emotions are shared, but with a twist: Bugs feel hate, or anger, or fear, but the focus isn't on the Bug itself, but on the group. Bugs, alone, don't react with fear or anger: they'll only do so when their home colony is threatened. Or, more precisely, young Bugs can be afraid on an individual level, but that goes away as they age.

I think the best way to do it would be to come up with behaviours that make evolutionary sense, and then figure out the drives behind those behaviours. (None of the above are really original, for instance: all of these are behaviors I borrowed from ants...)

To take the pon farr example, well, it was a little silly, but how about a sentient species with a mating period and no pair-bond, like cats? Their notion of love would probably not include feelings towards sexual partners, but they'd have notions of their own about heat/pon farr.
Or, going the other way, how about a species bird-like in behaviour? A lifelong pair bond would be driven by a not-quite-human notion of love; and how about the strong need to defend a territory at all costs?

I think its cute to see humans bound up by instincts the way animals are. Most people would probably rather read about penguins who act like humans than about humans who act like penguins ... but I have unusual tastes. Very good ideas, though. I would probably enjoy reading about a human culture whose behavior was in all ways similar to ours except for matters about reproduction. The more Earthlike they were in every other aspect, the more their one difference would stick out. Getting bird behavior into a species that doesnt lay eggs is probably going to be tough to pull off, though .... and I imagine a lot of people who try this would just decide to make their species a type of bird.

I have very little exposure to, and very little interest in, mass media, so Star Trek is completely alien to me (no pun intended). Pon farr seems like a nice idea, but I would find it more interesting to use something that already exists in nature but just doesnt sound like ordinary human behavior. e.g. as you suggest, it makes a lot more sense if there's an evolutionary reason behind the unusual behavior. I doubt the writers of Star Trek could ever convince me that pon farr was evolutionarily favorable for the Vulcans.

For awhile about ten years ago I was planning to do this myself, saying that the Poswobs were instinctually bound to only live within earshot of running water, meaning that if they were ever placed in a deep forest, field, or any other biome not immediately near water they would become afraid and inconsolable, and that this was an instinctive behavior that not even the strongest among them could override. I got the idea from reading about beavers. I havent completely ruled out the idea .... I still have my human cultures live mostly in non-overlapping habitats, defined by climate, so that e.g. the Moonshines are restricted to cold climates, the Poswobs to temperate forests, and some other groups to tropical rainforests. Thus, the maps of their nations look a lot like maps of animals' habitats.

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2020 6:03 pm Or, going the other way, how about a species bird-like in behaviour? A lifelong pair bond would be driven by a not-quite-human notion of love; and how about the strong need to defend a territory at all costs?

Lifelong pair bonds are the ideal in several human societies. I'm surprised you regard us as 'not-quite-human'.

Richard W wrote: ↑Mon May 04, 2020 8:30 am

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2020 6:03 pm Or, going the other way, how about a species bird-like in behaviour? A lifelong pair bond would be driven by a not-quite-human notion of love; and how about the strong need to defend a territory at all costs?

Lifelong pair bonds are the ideal in several human societies. I'm surprised you regard us as 'not-quite-human'.

That was awkwardly phrased, sorry. What I mean is that in several bird species, lifelong pair bonding seems to be a biological imperative -- which isn't the case in humans. (Some would suggest that we have a biological imperative to the contrary, but I'm not opening that particular can of worms...)