Hyperreal Emotion

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 2 introduces key historical and critical concerns about automated empathy, especially regarding the artifice and imposition of a narrow understanding of emotional life. The chapter clusters concern under two headings: ‘unnatural mediation’ and ‘mental integrity’. The first is shown to relate to over-simplicity, problems in method, and what drawing on media philosophy is phrased as a ‘hyperreal’ account of emotion. The chapter outlines how digital phenotyping and debatable theories of emotional life all impact on people through normalisation of a highly limited framing of emotion, especially given opaque and demographically nonrepresentative data sets already shown to have racist properties due to poor curation. The chapter also sets out more fundamental concerns by drawing on neuroethics and sensitivity of individual and collective mental states, privacy, rights to cognitive freedom, mental security, and need to protect first-person perspective and the life world of individuals and groups.