The idea that Data completely lacks emotion was always hollow to me. People don’t especially understand what emotions are or what it means to feel them. I think we lie to ourselves quite a lot that our decisions are “purely rational” even though everything in our environments influences those decisions.
Who hasn’t made a bad call because they were: tired, hungry, over heated, angry, or otherwise being affected by emotions? Is hunger an emotion? When Data decides that he will practice music today, is that part of an elaborate schedule he has planned years in advance, or is that what he “felt like” doing that day? Perhaps a long string of logic could explain why today is a good day to Vi-olen, but how is that different from the rationale I could put together for why I made a decision?
So what I’m saying is: I blame the writers! I think by season 3 they’d explored a little of the possibilities with Data about what humanity is and what it means to work with an android, but I don’t know that they ever really got a handle on what it would look like for a being of pure reason to emergently develop emotions.
Look at chatgpt and how readily it convinces people that there is a thinking being in there. When an LLM says “I’m happy to see you today, what can I do for you?” do we take that as a canned response with no real feeling behind it, or do we assume that because it can say it is happy, that it must be feeling happy?
Do we get much perspective on Data’s interiority? Perhaps he experiences a world of emotions we can’t even comprehend but has no understanding of how to express these things? His art work is called out as being soulless and copy-cat at various times. But also Data has a cat, and a daughter, and many friends. He tells bad jokes. It seems like there’s some kind of feelings going on in there, even if it comes out in his actions and not in his art.