Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

220 robots
Varieties of Affective States and Processes
Within the context of a sufficiently rich (e.g. human-like) architecture, we
can distinguish a wide range of affective states, depending on factors such as:
whether they are directed (e.g., craving an apple) or nonspecific
(e.g., general unease or depression)
whether they are long-lasting or short-lived
how fast they grow or wane in intensity
what sorts of belief-like, desire-like, and other states they include
which parts of an architecture trigger them
which parts of the architecture they can modulate
whether their operation is detected by processes that monitor
them
whether they in turn can be or are suppressed
whether they can become dormant and then be reawakened later
what sorts of external behaviors they produce
how they affect internal behaviors (e.g., remembering, deciding,
dithering, etc.)
whether they produce second-order affective states (e.g., being
ashamed of being angry)
what sorts of conceptual resource they require
Many of these distinctions, like the distinctions in the taxonomy in
Ortony, Clore, and Collins (1988), cannot be applied to organisms or robots
with much simpler architectures than an adult human one. For instance it is
not clear that the architecture of a newborn human infant can support longterm
affective states that are sometimes dormant because attention is diverted,
like long-term grief or intense patriotism.
ARCHITECTURAL CONSTRAINTS ON AFFECT
The precise variety of mental states and processes (affective and nonaffective)
that are possible for an individual or a species will depend on the informationprocessing
architecture of that individual or species. Insofar as humans at
different stages of development, humans with various kinds of pathology,
animals of different kinds, and robots all have different sorts of architecture,
that will constrain the classes of affective and other kinds of state they support.
The fact that different sorts of architecture support different classes of
mental state may mean that care is needed in talking about things like desires,
emotions, perception, and learning in different types of organisms and
machines, e.g., insects, rodents, primates, human infants, human adults, or