Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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directed to us or when their emotions relate to us. This very fact of knowing
that one is the subject of others’ mental states (that one is what other people
think about) is a critical condition for fully human communication between
individuals.
There are a few preliminary queries to answer before discussing the problem
of communication between individuals. The first query is about ourselves:
“What makes us self-conscious?” or “What makes us such that we can consciously
refer to ourselves as that particular self, different from other selves?”
There are several ways to answer this question, according to the level at which
one considers the idea of a self. One of these levels is that of the narrative self.
As a narrator, we obviously know who we are, where we are, what we are
presently doing, and what we were doing before. Unless we become demented
or amnesic, we have a strong feeling of continuity in our conscious experience.
We rely on declarative memory systems where souvenirs (albeit distorted)
can be retrieved and used as material for verbalization or imagination. Another
level is that of the embodied self. We recognize ourselves as the owner of a
body and the author of actions. At variance with the narrative self, the type of
self-consciousness that is linked to the experience of the embodied self is
discontinuous: it operates on a moment-to-moment basis as it is bound to
particular bodily events, like actions. Instead of explicitly answering questions
like “Who am I?” (something that the narrative self needs to know
permanently), the embodied self will answer questions like “Is this mine?”
or “Did I do this?”—questions to which we rarely care to give an explicit
response. In other words, the embodied self mostly carries an implicit mode
of self-consciousness, whereby self-consciousness is around but becomes manifest
only when required by the situation. The related information has a short
life span and usually does not survive the bodily event for very long.
The second question that has to be answered as a preliminary to the
discussion about communication is actually related to the first one: “Which
level of conscious experience are we considering for discussing communication
with other individuals?” By keeping a parallel with the above distinction
between a narrative level and an embodied level of the self, one could
propose that communication between individuals can be established at either
level. An act of communication between narrative selves commonly uses
a verbal approach, for example, “What are you going to do?” or “What do
you think?” or “Do you love me?” In other words, a narrative self aims at
establishing communication with a narrative other. He or she uses a rational
way of putting together available information and building a narrative structure
about the other person’s experience. By contrast, an act of communication
between embodied selves operates at a subpersonal level outside the
awareness and conscious strategies of the two selves. In this mode of communication,
the two selves establish contact to the extent that their mental