Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

228 robots
are sometimes unclear, inarticulate, confused, or inconsistent, the clarity and
consistency of our use of concepts like emotion, attention, learning, and so on
will be undermined. So, scientists, engineers, and philosophers who use those
concepts to ask questions, state theories, or propose practical goals are likely to
be confused or unclear. If we use architecture-based concepts, by defining new,
more precise versions of our old mental concepts in terms of the types of processes
supported by an underlying architecture, we may hope to avoid arguing
at cross purposes, e.g. about which animals have emotions, or how consciousness
evolved. (Similar comments may be made about using architecture-based
analysis to clarify some technical concepts in psychology, e.g. drive, executive
function.)
Where to Begin?
We agree with Turner & Ortony (1992) that the notion of “basic emotion”
involves deep muddles. Searching for a small number of basic emotions from
which others are composed is a bit like searching for a small number of chemical
reactions from which others are composed. It is the wrong place to look.
To understand a wide variety of chemical processes, a much better strategy
is to look for a collection of basic physical processes in the physical mechanisms
that underly the chemical reactions and see how they can be combined.
Likewise, with emotions, it is better to look for an underlying collection
of processes in information-based control systems (a mixture of virtual and
physical machines) that implement a wide variety of emotional (and other
affective) states and processes, rather than to try to isolate a subset of emotions
to provide the basis of all others, for example, by blending or vector
summation (see Chapter 10, Breazeal & Brooks).
The kinds of architectural presupposition on which folk psychology is
based are too vague and too shallow to provide explanations for working
systems, whether natural or artificial. Nevertheless, folk psychology is a useful
starting point as it is very rich and includes many concepts and implicit theories
that we use successfully in everyday life. However, as scientists and
engineers, we have to go beyond the architectures implicit in folk psychology
and add breadth and depth.
Since we do not know enough yet to get our theories right the first time,
we must be prepared to explore alternative architectures. In any case, there
are many types of organism with many similarities and differences in their
architectures. Different artificial systems will also need different architectures.
So, there are many reasons for not attending exclusively to any one
kind of architecture. Many different conjectured architectures can be inspired
by empirical evidence regarding biological systems, including humans at dif-