If you have stood on the top of a skyscraper or climbed a high mountain to emerge at the edge of a steep cliff, the chances are good that you have experienced the emotion of l’appel du vide.
A literal translation from French tells us that this emotion is the call of the void. The void in this feeling is death, embodied in the dramatic open space available for us to fall through for a few moments before the end of it all arrives.
L’appel du vide is the strange temptation we feel to leap from places so high that our fall would bring about certain death. It’s not a philosophical sensation, or even idle curiosity, but a primal feeling of the ease with which we could, in less than a second, decide to take the plunge. It’s a horrible experience of realizing that some aspect of us is exhilarated at the thought of jumping. We feel the intense desire to leap with the same vivid intensity as we feel hunger when presented with a plate of our favorite food.
We want this doom even though we aren’t depressed or in any other way suicidal. The thrill of plunging downward isn’t related to any other facet of our lives outside of the immediate moment as we look over the edge.
At almost the same moment, we feel shame and terror. We are astonished to discover our own desire for annihilation, and try to fight it, moving nervously away from the precipice, but even as we do so, we feel the entire planet shift beneath our feet, as if gravity is turning sideways, pulling us to the brink. We hold on desperately to anything solid, as if we would slip away without it. We fall to our knees in realization of our weakness.
Emotion AI companies claim that everything that we feel is nothing more than the combination of six basic emotions, proposed in the 1800s and researched in the middle of the last century: Anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness, and surprise. The statistical models of their machine learning processes fall apart, however, when faced with real-life feelings.
L’appel du vide is not just a dash of joy, mixed with a dose of surprise, added into a larger blend of fear and disgust. It is an emotional experience on its own terms, an urgent internal reality distinct from real danger and impossible to capture in any simple external signal. It is an eruption of qualia, and will never be measured by any digital scan.
