Let's say an alien gives you a chance to physically and emotionally feel something that no human has ever felt before, would you take it?

Debate Room
1

An alien offers a quick and painless process to add an extra organ to your body. You still look physically human, but you can feel things no human has ever felt. Removal of this organ is easy and non-lethal for humans.

Well, what do the other aliens think?

  • For some, it feels it brings great happiness and joy for granting them knowledge that “lesser” species can’t comprehend.

  • To others, it’s what keeps their entire species alive for so long because it’s a vital organ.

  • Some aliens actually opted to remove the organ because it’s painful and depressing for them. Their new and slowly growing religion also claims that they didn’t have that organ in the past, and it was given to them by a demon. This removal caused them to slowly die of cancer (that they are normally immune to because of the organ) and reduced their very long lifespans to a mere 13 human years. Their reasoning: “It’s better to die in bliss than live forever a slave”.

Since you are a human, if you choose to remove the organ after it’s been inserted into you, nothing happens and doesn’t physically harm you in any way.

2

Since these are hypothetical alien powers and situations, I’d like them to travel back in time to a strip club called Goldfingers in Prague and bring back one of the dancers I saw there in 2001. She had equipment designed for insertion and I’d be surprised if I didn’t feel something very unique.

In the OP scenario, though, how could it be determined that a feeling were totally exceptional if there were no language to describe it?

And without a social frame of reference, how could the uniqueness of the feeling ever be proven?

3

Well just pragmatically your hypothetical has no downside, which wouldn’t ever be true in the Real World, so if I were young I would probably try it out, assuming that I had good reason to trust the alien’s word for some reason. At this point in my life I’m not particularly experience-seeking in orientation so it’s not a super attractive idea.

Even in my younger days I would have assessed whether I really needed this hypothetical organ. Maybe I was already happy enough??

And being me, I would first want to know exactly what the organ does. Just like I want to understand what some medication the doctor wants to prescribe does.

4

@NatashaAnnaBaker, what would you do?

5

No. Those aliens can keep their paws off of me.

6

The title indicates the changes are physical and emotional feelings, so I presume this is relating to experiencing new emotions with corresponding physical sensations pertaining to those emotions.

The alien experiences suggest that the emotions felt may be positive or negative in nature.

The thing with emotions is, there is the emotion component, possibly some sort of associated physical feeling, and then there is the mental association with that emotion.

So when someone is “happy”, they have the positive emotion of happiness/joy, they have the associated physical sensations, and then there’s the mental association that the person understands they are happy.

However, the mental association is not innate. It’s learned and developed. There’s a neurological development for the emotion that is built over time.

So if a human receives this new organ that gives them the previously unfelt emotions and the associated physical feelings, there wouldn’t be a mental association present as the neurological pathways wouldn’t exist.

Also, considering that these emotions and physical sensations haven’t been felt by humans before, how would a human be able to identify what has triggered these emotions? What even would be their trigger? What language would one use to describe the emotions and their trigger? We wouldn’t have language for it already as they have never been experienced before.

There’s a condition known as “alexithymia” - some humans are unable to describe their emotions and can have difficulty identifying them. I would think this alien organ experience would operate much the same way - unexplained physical sensations, maybe a distant awareness of there being something, but indescribable and difficult/impossible to identify the source.

I think alexithymia would be a good real world example of the experience: it would be disconcerting. A source of confusion and puzzlement. Even the question of whether the emotion was intended to be positive or negative could be elusive.

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