Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

architectural basis of affect 225
are precedents for this in the history of science: a theory of the architecture of
matter refines and extends our pretheoretical classifications of types of matter
and types of process; a theory of how evolution works refines and extends
our pretheoretical ways of classifying kinds of living things, for example, grouping
whales with fish; and a theory of the physical nature of the cosmos changes
our pretheoretical classifications of observable things in the sky, even though
it keeps some of the distinctions, for example, between planets and stars
(Cohen, 1962).
The general CogAff framework should, in principle, be applicable beyond
life on earth, to accommodate many alien forms of intelligence, if there
are any. However, as it stands, it is designed for agents with a located body,
and some aspects will need to be revised for distributed agents or purely
virtual or otherwise disembodied agents.
If successful for the purposes of science and philosophy, the architecture
schema is also likely to be useful for engineering purposes, though
many engineering goals can be achieved using shallow concepts (defined
purely behaviorally) and shallow theories (linking conditions to observable
behaviors). For instance, this may be all that is required for production of
simple but effective “believable” agents for computer entertainments (see
also Chapter 10).
Intermediate cases may, as pointed out by Bates (1994), use architectures
that are broad in that they encompass many functions but shallow in
that the individual components are not realistic. Exploring broad and initially
shallow, followed by increasingly deep, implementations may be a good
way to understand the general issues. In the later stages of such research, we
can expect to discover mappings between the architectural functions and
neural mechanisms.
When Are Architectural Layers/Levels/Divisions the Same?
Many people produce layered diagrams that indicate different architectural
slices through a complex system. However, close textual analysis reveals that
things that look the same can actually be very different. For example, there
is much talk of “three-layer” models, but it is clear that not all three-layered
systems include the same sorts of layers. The model presented in Chapter 7
(Ortony et al.) has three layers (reactive, routine, and reflective), but none
of these maps directly onto the three layers of the CogAff model. For example,
their middle layer, the routine layer, combines some aspects of what
we assign to the lowest layer, the reactive layer (e.g., learned, automatically
executable strategies), and their reflective layer (like the reflective layer in
Minsky, 2003) includes mechanisms that we label as part of the deliberative