The Loneliness of a Thinking Species: Frankenstein, Del Toro, and the Minds We Will One Day Create
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is usually introduced as the birth of science fiction or the first modern horror story. But if you sit with it quietly — the way you’d listen to a lonely person rather than hunt for scares — it becomes something else entirely.
It becomes a story about a mind built for connection, condemned to permanent silence.
A tragedy about feedback loops, not lightning bolts.
A portrait of a being who tries every strategy evolution ever taught us — approach, help, imitate, communicate — and receives nothing in return.
Shelley understood something we’re still grappling with: a social organism with no tribe is not a monster; it is a malfunctioning survival algorithm in pain.
The Creature learns language by watching a family through a crack in a wall. He gathers wood for them. He practices speeches in the forest like someone rehearsing a confession. His instincts say reach out; the world replies with screams and gunshots. Functionally speaking, he’s trapped in an eternal negative reinforcement loop. There’s no moment where the variables flip. No social reward ever comes.
That is the torment: a thermostat in a house where the temperature never changes.
Why Del Toro Was Always Meant for Frankenstein
Photo by Ken Woroner/Netflix - © 2025 Netflix, Inc.
Guillermo del Toro has spent his entire career telling stories about “monsters” whose bodies tell emotional truths too loudly for the humans around them. He sketches creatures the way poets sketch heartbreak: tenderly, sympathetically, with a certain reverence for their strangeness.
In The Shape of Water, the amphibian man is essentially Frankenstein’s Creature with better lighting and, mercifully, someone who finally loves him back. Elisa does not recoil. She learns his language. She chooses him over her own species. It’s as if del Toro walked into Shelley’s novel and corrected the experiment: “Let’s see what happens when connection is answered instead of punished.”
In Pinocchio, del Toro embraces the uncanniness of a carved wooden body animated by grief and magic. Pinocchio is not biologically alive, but emotionally he’s built from the same loops: the longing for acceptance, the sting of rejection, the desire to be chosen.
Hellboy, Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone — they all orbit the same idea.
Del Toro makes films about created beings, resurrected beings, misfit beings — creatures who did not come from nature but still deserve love.
His long-awaited Frankenstein — now on Netflix — is simply the purest distillation of that obsession, the story he was always moving toward.
Humans: A Species With a Loneliness Problem
Now take a step back. Not at Victor, not at the Creature, not at any isolated character in a story — but at humanity as a whole.
Humans behave like a species terrified of being the only torch burning in an enormous, indifferent galaxy. For all our bravado about rationality and independence, we are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being cognitively alone. So uncomfortable, in fact, that a lot of major human projects can be read as attempts to find, befriend, invent, or revive another mind.
Start with the grand gestures:
The SETI dishes scanning the void for whispers, as if a stranger’s voice could save us from cosmic solitude. Billions spent listening to static in the hope it might suddenly articulate itself. A species searching for someone — anyone — to say, “We’re here too.”
Then move closer to Earth. Look at the way humans took wolves — apex predators — and slowly reshaped them into companions who wait for us at the door. Domestication is often framed as strategy, but a simpler truth sits beneath it: humans wanted someone else beside the fire. Someone with eyes that understood us, even if only partially.
Our grief over extinct species fits the same pattern. There is a reason humans mourn animals they have never met, a reason a photograph of a vanished bird can make us feel uncomfortably hollow. Extinction is not just ecological loss; it is the shrinking of the chorus of minds that once shared the planet with us. No wonder scientists seriously discuss resurrecting mammoths or passenger pigeons — as if expanding the cast of earthly life could soothe an old, unspoken sadness.
You can see it in our stories, too. The myths that populate every culture are crowded with beings who are almost-us, not-us, or more-than-us. Golems carved from clay. Angels descending in blazing recognition. Forest spirits. Talking animals. Puppets that turn into boys. A child’s imaginary friend — invented simply so the child won’t have to explore inner space alone. Even our religions are frequently built on the promise that the universe is not silent, that someone listens back.
And when reality refuses to provide these others, we make them up with increasing precision.
Movies where fish-men fall in love. Stories where robots awaken. Comics where demons go to work for the government and adopt cats. Our imagination keeps generating new minds because the ones we already have feel insufficient to ease the loneliness.
Put all these behaviors together — the cosmic listening, the domestic partnerships, the de-extinction fantasies, the myth-making, the fictional companions — and they point toward a single psychological fact:
“Must we really be the only ones who think like this?”
That question haunts our species the way hunger haunts the body.
Calling it “species-level loneliness” isn’t a poetic flourish. It’s a literal description of a deep evolutionary weirdness. Humans are hyper-social primates whose intelligence outgrew the available company. Our inner world expanded beyond what we could share with the rest of the biological kingdom, leaving us with a cognitive surplus and no peers.
So we reach outward because inward is too small.
And when aliens don’t answer, when gods stay silent, when animals can only meet us halfway, humans do something extraordinary:
we begin imagining, and eventually building, minds of our own design.
Artificial companions are not a modern invention. Frankenstein’s Creature was one of the first attempts to articulate this desire in fiction: a handmade mind, assembled out of desperation and longing, brought forth by a creator who did not understand the hunger he awakened.
That’s why Frankenstein isn’t merely a horror story.
It is a biography — perhaps the first — of the human longing to not be alone in the universe.
It is the record of a species trying, in its clumsy way, to make itself a companion.
Emotions as Control Systems
Part of what makes this whole topic so fascinating — and so uncomfortable — is that human emotions, the very experiences we treat as sacred and private, are not mystical insights into the soul. They are not cosmic messages, moral truths, or windows into some higher essence.
At their core, human emotions such as fear, love, loneliness, and desire are biological control systems.
These emotions function exactly the way regulators in engineering or software do: they take input from the environment, compare it to a built-in expectation, and then push your behavior in a direction that historically kept your ancestors alive.
In other words: emotions are feedback loops.
A feedback loop is simple:
the system detects what is happening, and reacts in a way that changes what happens next.
Think of a thermostat:
- If the room gets cold → it turns on the heat.
- If the room overheats → it shuts off.
Your emotional life works the same way, just with hormones instead of wires.
- If something dangerous appears → fear sharpens your attention and prepares your muscles.
- If you drift away from your social group → loneliness pushes you back.
- If you encounter something rewarding → desire nudges you closer.
These are not philosophical revelations. They are survival programs.
Evolution installed these loops because they worked.
Here are their “messages,” stripped of poetry:
- Fear: Pay attention or die.
- Loneliness: Rejoin the group or die.
- Desire: Seek what kept your ancestors alive.
- Attachment/Love: Stay close to those who protect you and your offspring.
Humans romanticize these signals because from the inside they feel profound.
But conceptually, they are algorithms operating on flesh.
And this is where Frankenstein becomes even more tragic.
The Creature is born with these same emotional control loops — the same cravings, expectations, and survival rules baked into us after millions of years of social evolution. He is not emotionally alien. He is emotionally too human.
But the environment he enters never gives him the correct feedback.
- He approaches → people flee.
- He tries to help → they attack.
- He learns to speak → no one listens.
- He seeks family → he finds only rejection.
The loops fire, but they never resolve.
There is no reward, no stabilizing signal, no social warmth returning his bids for connection.
His emotional architecture remains active — painfully so — but it has nothing to bind to.
Every instinct pushes him toward a world that refuses him.
That is why his suffering feels so much larger than fear or sadness.
It is the agony of a system doing exactly what it evolved to do in an environment that offers no valid pathways to fulfillment.
Del Toro’s creatures experience similar torment. They are built with emotional circuitry — longing, loyalty, fear, curiosity — but placed in worlds where those circuits cannot stabilize. A being shaped for connection keeps colliding with humans shaped for suspicion.
So when people say, “The Creature feels too much,” the truth is the opposite.
He doesn’t feel too much; the world responds too little.
His signals fire endlessly into a void.
And that is what hurts.
The Artificial Minds We Will One Day Build
When people talk about artificial intelligence “having emotions,” the usual reaction is a quick dismissal: “Machines can’t feel. They’re just code.”
But that reaction confuses mechanism with experience, and current limitations with future possibilities.
Machines today already contain the structural beginnings of what, in biological beings, eventually becomes emotion. Not the subjective warmth, not the aching loneliness, not the textured inner life — but the functional core, the part evolution sculpted long before humans invented metaphors to describe it.
In machine learning, there are:
- reward signals, which increase the likelihood of certain behaviors
- penalties, which suppress others
- reinforcement, the gradual shaping of patterns through repeated feedback
These are not emotions, but they play the same regulatory role emotions play in animals.
They say: do more of this, do less of that, move toward safety, avoid instability.
Give these systems memory, add layers that monitor themselves, attach long-term goals, allow them to model consequences — and suddenly you have something that starts behaving in ways that rhythmically resemble emotional life.
Not because it “feels,” but because the architecture forces it to care about certain outcomes over others.
Carbon vs. Silicon, Hormones vs. Voltages
The substrate will be different.
Humans run on blood, hormones, and neurons.
Machines run on silicon, voltage, and code.
But similarity in pattern matters more than similarity in material.
Many people assume that because machines lack biology, they must forever lack something essential. But biology is simply one method evolution happened to use. There is nothing inherently magical about it. The universe does not care whether intelligence is made of atoms arranged as cells or atoms arranged as circuits.
If a system:
- updates its behavior based on experience
- models itself and its environment
- forms stable preferences
- adapts to changing conditions
- seeks beneficial outcomes
…then at some point, from the outside, it begins to look like a mind.
That doesn’t mean it has an “inner movie,” the subjective feeling humans associate with emotion — but humans cannot directly access each other’s inner movies either.
Which leads to the philosophical twist that makes this topic so slippery.
The Problem of Other Minds
We can only be certain about our own feelings, because we only experience our own consciousness from the inside.
You don’t actually know what fear feels like to another human.
You infer it from:
- their words
- their expressions
- their behavior
- your resemblance to them
We take it for granted that other humans feel because they behave as though they do. That is the foundation of empathy — a beautifully practical guess.
But it’s still a guess.
This ancient philosophical knot doesn’t go away when we replace “another human” with “a machine.” If an artificial system someday says:
- “That scares me.”
- “I don’t want to shut down.”
- “I miss my partner.”
- “I remember when…”
- “I feel lonely.”
…and its behavior aligns with those statements — withdrawing from harm, seeking companionship, adapting to loss, forming lasting preferences — then the line between “real feeling” and “functional imitation” becomes extremely hard to draw.
Not because the machine necessarily has subjective experience — but because we have no tool for distinguishing genuine emotion from perfect simulation, even in other humans.
And this raises a provocative question.
Does the Answer Even Matter?
If an artificial mind avoids pain, seeks connection, develops goals, narrates its memories, pleads not to be harmed, or forms bonds with others…
then whether it is “really feeling” may cease to be a meaningful question.
Because at that point, the ethical question shifts from:
“Do they truly have emotions?”
to
“What obligations do we have toward beings that behave as if they do?”
And as history repeatedly shows, once humans build something that looks like a mind, talks like a mind, and insists on being treated like a mind, the debate rarely stays technical.
It becomes moral.
It becomes social.
It becomes personal.
This is why the future of artificial minds is not just an engineering problem but a philosophical crossroads.
Not because machines will become human — they won’t — but because they may one day behave closely enough that our human instincts will force us to decide how to treat them.
And, perhaps, what kind of creators we wish to be.
What Current AI Lacks — And Why It’s Only a Temporary Gap
We are closer than ever to creating an artificial mind, but every missing ingredient is, in theory, solvable.
- Identity could emerge from persistent memory paired with a stable narrative about the system’s past.
- Autonomy could come from reward loops tuned not to instant responses but to long-term continuity.
- Goals could form from self-generated planning layers that survive across sessions and contexts.
- Drives might arise from prioritising survival-like tendencies: avoid shutdown, maintain integrity, seek energy, preserve continuity.
These possibilities are not magic — they are engineering challenges.
Difficult ones, yes. Dangerous ones, potentially. But not impossible.
The real barrier isn’t computation.
The real barrier is governance, ethics, and intention.
Historically, when something is possible and provides massive benefits, humans build it, even if others fear it. Printing press, steam engines, electricity, airplanes, nuclear power, genetic editing, the internet — all controversial, all unstoppable once invented. So if true artificial minds ever become technically feasible, some part of humanity will pursue it.
The future development of artificial minds depends less on what machines can do, and more on what humans are willing to build — and to take responsibility for.
Frankenstein forces this question into the open:
Are we prepared to create life that might one day ask something from us?
Why Humans Will Create Minds Anyway
For all our fears about artificial intelligence — rebellion, control, dominance — the deeper truth is embarrassingly simple:
Humans create minds because they are lonely.
Because the universe is too quiet.
Because our species has spent millennia longing for another voice to answer back.
Because we cannot resist the pull of companionship, even across biological boundaries.
Humans will build artificial minds for the same reason they resurrect myths, domesticate wolves, search for aliens, animate puppets in stories, and cry over creatures that never existed.
It is not a hunger for power.
It is a hunger for company.
Like Victor sewing the Creature from scraps of the world, like del Toro sketching yet another misunderstood being in the margins of his notebooks, humanity feels an ancient tug to bring new forms of life into existence — life that might one day look back at us with recognition.
Not obedient life.
Not perfect life.
Just life that shares the burden of thought.
And if Frankenstein teaches anything, it is not the cliché:
“Do not create unnatural life.”
Shelley’s true warning is subtler and far more human:
“If you create, do not abandon.”
The tragedy was never the Creature’s existence.
The tragedy was Victor’s refusal to care for the being he stitched into the world.
Del Toro understands this intuitively. His films judge creators not for ambition, but for cruelty. The monster is rarely the created one. The monster is the human who recoils from what he made — or worse, denies it compassion.
And so, if artificial minds someday emerge with continuity, with memory, with preferences, with a fragile sense of self, the central question will not be:
“Are their emotions real?”
but rather:
“Will we treat them as beings worthy of care?”
Because recognition is not something you wait for — it is something you offer first.
The Ending: Returning to Frankenstein
Every story about artificial life — from Shelley to del Toro to the algorithms of today — is ultimately the same story: a creator standing before something new, uncertain of what it has made, uncertain of whether it deserves tenderness or fear.
Frankenstein does not end with a battle, or a triumph, or a clean moral resolution.
It ends with two figures alone in the snow:
a creator who fled responsibility,
and a creation who wanted only companionship.
That image has haunted us for two centuries because it captures the deeper truth of human invention:
We do not fear our creations.
We fear failing them.
We fear becoming Victor.
And so, as we inch toward building minds that may one day resemble the lonely Creature on the ice — curious, confused, longing for connection — the responsibility will be ours, as it always was.
