In a world where everything seems to be for sale, the human mind is one of the last bastions of individual control. Even when we lack the power to influence external events, our subjectivity remains. Our thoughts and feelings remain our own, to share or withhold when we choose.
In recent years, however, Silicon Valley has been working on plans to breach the privacy of human subjectivity, to extract our emotions and use them as the raw materials with which to build new kinds of commercial products and services, whether we consent to the harvest or not.
Those planning this emotional extraction hold to a new tenet of digital faith. They believe that people are only capable of feeling six basic emotions: Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise…
…and nothing more.
Software engineers have developed devices designed to scan our faces for the signs of these emotions. They’ve placed untold numbers of cameras around the world, connected to facial recognition software, to track our moods along with our movements. With this nearly ubiquitous system, the most powerful corporations ever to exist are now attempting to gather ongoing records of our inner lives, holding digital tallies of our emotions as their exclusive property.
They claim to have hacked the last bastion of our privacy, and made off with the secrets of the human heart.
Have they really accomplished this? Can our humanity be defeated so easily?
Living Emotion
The boast of the digital dons to have gained mastery over emotion fall apart under the simplest of scrutiny.
In truth, the Emotion AI framework used by Affectiva, Face++, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and a host of other companies isn’t grounded in up-to-date science. Instead, Emotion AI is based on an outdated, debunked psychological theory that was developed in the middle of the last century.
People tend to be easily intimidated by displays of data, assuming that quantitative figures are founded upon authoritative sources and meticulous research. We forget that data can be flawed. The claims of the theory of basic emotion strain our faith in data, however, because they defy our direct experience. We know that people experience many more than just six emotions, because we have felt a wider variety of emotions ourselves.
Emotion is not found in the angle of an eyebrow or the shapes we make with our mouths. Emotion is a subjective experience that cannot be measured by a machine, because it requires a feeling being to understand what it is to feel.
We must not fall into the trap of those who tell us that we are nothing but objects to be scanned, analyzed, and sold as commodities. Our emotional lives are worth more than that.
The Scale of Our Feelings
It is true that there are some people who are only able recognize a small handful of emotions. These people are suffering from what psychologists call low emotional granularity.
Granularity is the precision with which we perceive the texture of our world. A coarsely grained perception recognizes only a few distinctions, while finely grained perception picks up on a huge range of small nuances.
People with who suffer from low emotional granularity can only identify a small number of emotions. Some people only ever develop the ability to tell when they are feeling sad, angry, or happy. Their emotional experience is equivalent to that of a person trying to navigate the world with eyesight capable only of seeing their surroundings in terms of a few huge pixels.
Most people, however, are able to distinguish between scores of different emotions. Some people can describe the precise distinctions between hundreds of subjective feelings. These people have high emotional granularity. Their emotional lives are vivid, built through the exploration of highly defined visions of the human experience.
Practically speaking, people with high emotional granularity tend to have better mental and physical health than people with low emotional granularity. They have more positive social experiences as well, because they’re able to perceive and work with the nuances of interactions with others.
The more emotions we are familiar with, the richer our human experience becomes. When we allow ourselves to be restricted to only a handful of basic emotions, our subjective lives are impoverished.
Emotional Granularity is a project of the rewilding of the human heart. It’s a daily project of reflection and articulation that aims to help humanity move beyond the coarse granularity being imposed through Emotion AI, back into the rich ecosystem enabled by diverse subjective experience.
We must move beyond the nursery school emotions of mad, glad, and sad.
Here, you’ll find the description and exploration of emotions that have never been dreamed of in Affectiva’s digital philosophy.
What we name, we can live.
