This is a theory that I've been thinking about for the last week or so. I've been trying to post this to the sub, but for some reason it's not showing up in the thread, and I really want to get others thoughts on it. After this latest episode, I really think this could be the true purpose of the severance chip.
I've been thinking about what we've seen so far on the Severed floor at Lumon, and how they could possibly connect to each other and make sense.
Why would a company be raising goats, 3D printing seemingly random objects, and have a dept picking out numbers in spreadsheets based on emotion?
Kier Eagan believed that if you could master "the four tempers" that you would master yourself and the world. I think that's the key here, the Lumon cult around Kier is all based on his teachings and beliefs, and the company basically worships him.The Severance chip is tracking and mapping these four tempers, or emotional regions, of the brain.
Each of the departments we've seen so far are doing different activities that lets the chip read the emotional response in a person's brain, and then map each region and how it reacts.The person being severed is critical to getting pure unbiased data of how the activities they are performing make them feel.
Lumon doesn't just want to control what people are allowed to remember, they want to control what people feel.
MDR is performing cerebral work that creates a feeling based on the numbers, what they're doing isn't really important, it's not the point. How the data affects their emotions is all that really matters.Why would you need someone to "refine" a file or data-set that you already know the exact amount of data that needs to be refined?
Everything they bin of the emotional data is already known, they have a percentage tracker of their work. The system already knows it's there, and knows where it goes, and to what emotion. It's more like a video game then it is actual work. Why else would Lumon not care that they only complete 1 in 5 files, and why would they expire? It's a pressure to work and feel like you're doing something time sensitive.
O&D is creating 3D printed objects to track and map how physical objects create an emotional response. They are also in charge of the artwork and that tracks how people have an emotional response to visual artistic stimuli.
Remember how Burt's character made the comment about how the watering cans felt different than the hatchets they made the previous week felt.
The Goat room is tracking how living animals create emotions in a person. That guy feeding them was extremely upset at the idea of them being taken from him.
The wellness room with Ms Casey gives "emotional support" to employees using verbal information about their outtie and also gives Mark clay to make a sculpture about how he is feeling at that time.
The break room is the process of breaking people through what appears to be brainwashing. Mr. Milchick is even sitting there with a machine that's tracking how they feel, and can tell if they are really sorry.
If you can make people feel upset, angry, sad, happy, or whatever when you give them stimuli you can control what they want, and what they like and don't like.
Lumon would be the true masters of the four tempers that Kier's philosophy spoke of.
I think there's more to their plan than just that, but imagine what you could do with someone that you permanently severed and then had total control of how they felt at all times. You would be able to create perfect slaves.
This theory makes all of the departments and work make sense, its not random, its specific types of stimuli that each create an emotional response in people based on the activity they are performing. Using severed workers makes sense because they aren't skewing the data by thinking about their outside life or something unrelated to the controlled environment they are in.
The bland drab environment helps reduce outside environmental factors from affecting the data.
Keeping departments separate, discouraging physical contact, and everything that isolates the employees is all based around keeping people from having any feelings that aren't related to the work.
Even the token rewards make sense, they're tracking the feelings that rewards create in people. The food parties are creating an emotional response to a food reward, the music party is creating an emotional response to music, etc.
Everything is based around various stimuli and creating emotional responses in people. It would allow them to create a complete map of the emotional regions in a person's brain.