Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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proach to emotion may also prove relevant to the study of consciousness,
revealing its manifold nature (Rorty, 1980; Churchland, 1984).
While one could hardly say that there is a general consensus on the nature
of consciousness, many of the theories proposed in recent years are built
around the concept of working memory. Borrowing a term from computer
technology, memory researchers sometimes refer to temporary storage mechanisms
as buffers. It is now believed that a number of specialized buffers exist.
For example, each sensory system has one or more temporary buffers. These
aid in perception, allowing the system to compare what it is seeing or hearing
now to what it saw or heard a moment ago. There are also temporary
buffers associated with aspects of language use (these help keep the first part
of a sentence in mind until the last part is heard so that the whole thing can
be understood). The specialized memory buffers work in parallel, independently
of one another.
Working memory consists of a workspace, where information from the
specialized buffers can be held temporarily, and a set of executive functions
that control operations performed on this information. The executive functions
take care of the overall coordination of the activities of working memory,
such as determining which specialized systems should be attended to at the
moment and shuffling information in and out of the workspace from these
and other systems. This idea is not fundamentally different from the concept
of a “blackboard” in traditional artificial intelligence (Hanson & Riseman,
1978; Erman, Hayes-Roth, Lesser, & Reddy, 1980; Jagannathan, Dodhiawala,
& Baum, 1997).
A computer simulation of the weather is not the same thing as rain or
sunshine (Johnson-Laird, 1988). Working memory theories, in dealing with
consciousness in terms of processes rather than as content, try to explain what
kinds of computational function might be responsible for and underlie conscious
experiences, but they do not explain what it is like to have those experiences.
These theories provide an account of the way human minds work, in
a general sense, rather than an account of what a particular experience is like
in a particular mind. They can suggest how a representation might be created
in working memory but not what it is like to be aware of that representation.
They suggest how decision processes in working memory might lead to movement
but not what it is like to actually decide to move. In other words, working
memory is likely to be the platform on which conscious experience stands;
but consciousness, especially its phenomenal or subjective nature, is not
completely explained by the computational processes that underlie working
memory, at least not in a way that anyone presently comprehends.
Figuring out the exact nature of consciousness and the mechanisms by
which it emerges out of collections of neurons is truly an important problem.