Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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or implicitly adopted definitions of emotion that take account of the underlying
architecture and the processes that the architecture can support, which
have assumed that there is a clear and unambiguous notion of “emotion” and
which have not, which are primarily interested in solving an engineering
design problem (e.g., producing artifacts that are entertaining or demonstrate
how humans react to certain perceived behaviors), and which are attempting
to model or explain naturally occurring states and processes. One thing
that is relatively unusual that we have attempted is to produce a generic
framework to accommodate a wide variety of types of organism and machine.
We hope that more researchers will accept that challenge, and the challenge
of developing a useful ontology for describing and comparing different
architectures so that work in this area can grow into a mature science instead
of a large collection of ad hoc and loosely related studies that are hard
to compare and contrast.
The view we have propounded contradicts some well-known theories
of emotions, in particular Jamesian theories (James, 1890; Damasio, 1994),
according to which having an emotion involves sensing some pattern in one’s
physiological state. The claim that many emotions involve changes to physiological
states (e.g., blood pressure, muscular tension, hormones in the bloodstream)
is perfectly consistent with what we have said about emotions, but
not the claim that such processes are necessary conditions for emotions.
Theories proposing such necessary conditions have a hard problem accommodating
long-term emotional states that are often temporarily suppressed
by other states and processes, for instance, long-term grief, long-term concern
about a threat to one’s job, or intense long-term devotion to a political
project.
However, others do present architectural ideas partly similar to our own,
though arrived at from a completely different standpoint (see Barkley, 1997,
for an example from neuropsychiatry). Our emphasis on the link between the
concept of emotion and mechanisms that produce strong dispositions to disrupt
and redirect other processing also fits much folk psychology and features
of emotions that make them the subject of novels. Changes in blood pressure,
galvanic skin responses, and levels of hormones are not usually of much interest
to readers of great literature compared to changes in thought processes,
preferences, evaluations, how much people can control their desires, the extent
to which their attention is strongly held by someone or something, and
the consequences thereof. These are features of what we have called “tertiary”
emotions, which usually involve rich semantic content as well as strong control
states. When a robot first tells you in detail why it is upset by your critical
analysis of the poems it has written, you will be far more likely to believe it
has emotions than if it merely blushes, weeps, and shakes its head. Even ducking
to avoid being hit by a large moving object might just be a simple planned