Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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“Edison” and “Russell”
Definitions versus Inventions in the
Analysis of Emotion
jean-marc fellous and
michael a. arbib
Editors’ Note: Edison and Russell met at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
Russell, energized by his recent conversations with McCulloch and Pitts,
discovered in himself a new passion for the logics of the brain, while Edison
could not stop marveling at the perfection and complexity of this electrochemical
machine. Exhausted by 5 days among the multitudes, they found themselves
resting at a café outside the convention center and started chatting about
their impressions of the meeting. Edison, now an established roboticist, and
Russell, newly a theoretical neurobiologist, soon came to the difficult topic of
emotion.
Russell suggested that “It would be useful to have a list of definitions
of key terms in this subject—drive, motivation, and emotion for starters—that
also takes account of logical alternative views. For example, I heard
Joe LeDoux suggest that basic emotions did not involve feelings, whereas I
would suggest that emotions do indeed include feelings and that ‘emotions
without feelings’ might be better defined as drives!” Edison replied that he
would rather build a useful machine than give it a logical definition but
prompted Russell to continue and elaborate, especially on how his view could
be of use to the robotics community.