Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

204 robots
case of CogAff, conjectured as a type of architecture that can explain or
replicate human mental phenomena. We show how the concepts that are
definable in terms of such architectures can clarify and enrich research
on human emotions. If successful for the purposes of science and philosophy,
the architecture is also likely to be useful for engineering purposes,
though many engineering goals can be achieved using shallow concepts
and shallow theories, e.g., producing “believable” agents for computer
entertainments. The more human-like robot emotions will emerge, as they
do in humans, from the interactions of many mechanisms serving different
purposes, not from a particular, dedicated “emotion mechanism.”
Many confusions and ambiguities bedevil discussions of emotion.
As a way out of this, we present a view of mental phenomena, in general,
and the various sorts of things called “emotions,” in particular, as states
and processes in an information-processing architecture. Emotions are a
subset of affective states. Since different animals and machines can have
different kinds of architecture capable of supporting different varieties of
state and process, there will be different families of such concepts, depending
on the architecture. For instance, if human infants, cats, or robots lack
the sort of architecture presupposed by certain classes of states (e.g., obsessive
ambition, being proud of one’s family), then they cannot be in those
states. So the question of whether an organism or a robot needs emotions
or needs emotions of a certain type reduces to the question of what sort of
information-processing architecture it has and what needs arise within such
an architecture.
NEEDS, FUNCTIONS, AND FUNCTIONAL STATES
The general notion of X having a need does not presuppose a notion of goal
or purpose but merely refers to necessary conditions for the truth of some
statement about X, P(X). In trivial cases, P(X) could be “X continues to exist,”
and in less trivial cases, something like “X grows, reproduces, avoids or repairs
damage.” All needs are relative to something for which they are necessary
conditions. Some needs are indirect insofar as they are necessary for
something else that is needed for some condition to hold. A need may also
be relative to a context since Y may be necessary for P(X) only in some contexts.
So “X needs Y” is elliptical for something like “There is a context, C,
and there is a possible state of affairs, P(X), such that, in C, Y is necessary