Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

A Design-Based Ontology
architectural basis of affect 211
We suggest that “emotion” is best regarded as an imprecise label for a subset
of the more general class of affective states. We can use the ideas introduced
in the opening section to generate architecture-based descriptions of the variety
of states and processes that can occur in different sorts of natural and
artificial systems. Then, we can explore ways of carving up the possibilities
in a manner that reflects our pretheoretical folk psychology constrained by
the need to develop explanatory scientific theories.
For instance, we shall show how to distinguish affective states from other
states. We shall also show how our methodology can deal with more detailed
problems, for instance, whether the distinction between emotion and
motivation collapses in simple architectures (e.g., see Chapter 7, Ortony et al.).
We shall show that it does not collapse if emotions are defined in terms of
one process interrupting or modulating the “normal” behavior of another.
We shall also see that where agents (e.g., humans) have complex, hybrid
information-processing architectures involving a variety of types of
subarchitectures, they may be capable of having different sorts of emotion,
percept, desire, or preference according to which portions of the architecture
are involved. For instance, processes in a reactive subsystem may be
insect-like (e.g., being startled), while other processes (e.g., long-term grief
and obsessive jealousy) go far beyond anything found in insects. This is why,
in previous work, we have distinguished primary, secondary, and tertiary
emotions 3 on the basis of their architectural underpinnings: primary emotions
(e.g., primitive forms of fear) reside in a reactive layer and do not require
either the ability to represent possible but non-actual states of the
world, or hypothetical reasoning abilities; secondary emotions (e.g., worry,
i.e., fear about possible future events) intrinsically do, and for this, they need
a deliberative layer; tertiary emotions (e.g., self-blame) need, in addition, a
layer (“meta-management”) that is able to monitor, observe, and to some
extent oversee processing in the deliberative layer and other parts of the
system. This division into three architectural layers is only a rough categorization
as is the division into three sorts of emotion (we will elaborate more
in a later section). Further sub-divisions are required to cover the full variety
of human emotions, especially as emotions can change their character
over time as they grow and subside (as explained in Sloman, 1982). A similar
theory is presented in a draft of The Emotion Machine (Minsky, 2003).
This task involves specifying information-processing architectures that
can support the types of mental state and process under investigation. The
catch is that different architectures support different classes of emotion,
different classes of consciousness, different varieties of perception, and