So it turns out, emotion detection is actually quite difficult. While I have nearly constant problems with understanding other people's true feelings about things - fuck society and language for being vague and lying about their emotions - but what's even worse is detecting my own emotions¹⁾. For the longest time, I was not able to tell you whether I liked something or not - food, music, smells, weather, haptic experiences, my consciouness always ever received the raw sensory data, not anything related to interpretation. While I know if I definitely do not like something - like Salad or certain types of music - I can not feel it if I am experiencing something that I do like. Figuring that out typically takes me weeks, months and, in many cases, years. Society expects me to have opinions quickly, so I often say something (whatever seems most likely at that point) but I usually cannot genuinely tell.

None of that are natural, automatic processes for me, and they take conscious effort to work through. Without access to my own emotions, I rely on empirical analysis to draw conclusions. At the same time I am trying to fit into a society that expects me to respect other people's feelings and have some of my own. Pain is perhaps the only feeling I was ever able to properly feel, even though you would expect from a narcissist that they are able to at least also feel shame. But no, that's exactly the point of narcissism, to shield myself from the shame - so even the shame is inaccessible (if not the most inaccessible thing in my entire brain). Next to the Comms Engine, the Emotions Engine is one of the heaviest systems in me, the result of over 15 years of data collection, analysis, incremental improvement, all to help myself fit in better with society around me (while also figuring out what the fuck is wrong with me).

So! The Emotional Engine is there to make this work! Detect others' emotions, detect mine, decide which emotion is the proper emotion to feel and express, while figuring out over years what I am truly feeling, all whilst managing the pain inside me and, and this is where this gets interesting, curbing the emotions that I do get.

The problem with my emotions is that what little does get through is typically destructive and problematic. “This person will betray me, abandon them”, “This person is trying to hurt me, be defensive”, if I actually acted on this I would not be able to survive for a single day. Another job of the Emotions Engine, for me, is to install and enforce so-called “policies” that I, in the moments of rational thought, devise. Such policies, in their simplest form, can be something like “when you feel like you are being attacked, don't act on it”, but it is typically much more specific and is individualized for every person I am interacting with, as each of them require a different approach to get along with (and stop my brain from making too much drama).

These policies are devised and installed on the Direct Engine level, which is a pretty strong position but far from infallible. Over time these policies have become weaker due to stress, medication and an improvement in my emotional situation (which inherently also makes the emotions stronger and harder to resist/manage). There are manual and external accesses/overrides, but these are given out and used only in the most exceptional cases. Until then, my primary weapon against my emotions is emotional self-amputation.

If I don't feel the things humans feel, what do I feel instead? Mostly emptiness or pain, I guess? It used to get better, I was able to work myself towards a generalized understanding of my emotions, and I began genuinely feeling things. Unfortunately, I lost much of that progress in a crisis in 2025²⁾. Not that I want to say that I've had the problem solved - the closest I've ever gotten was probably around 10% - but that is a lot and was already enough for me to live a much better, self-determined life.

On a different note, I really got quite lucky that I've grown up juuust well enough to have still experienced a basic notion of pleasure and suffering. Just enough so that I was able to form a coherent moral framework around it. If I hadn't, I would never have conceptualized “pain” - and that could have lead to me acting like there is no pain in the world, that pain does not matter, that everyone feels the same pain anyway. I would have never formed even a basic form of morality. I think I was genuinely this close to becoming a true, depraved psychopath (although, to be fair, while this would be the next step, that next step is very tall and very far away). I was given just enough to be technically able to figure out how to not be a psychopath, but then I was placed as far away from it as possible. And you can see that in the person that I have become. Very… on the edge - and I haven't even mentioned the emotional drama unfolding inside of me.