Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

eware the passionate robot 337
not suit you”—that do not seem emotional. My suggestion, however, is that
the potential for feeling is essential to the concept of emotion, as I will try
to make more clear when I set the stage for a new look at biological evolution
below. This is clearly a work in progress.
THE NARRATIVE CHRONOLOGICALLY REARRANGED
AND ANNOTATED
In this section, I rearrange the narrative of the previous section, annotating
it to make clear the hugely cognitive content of most of the emotional states
reported, thus setting down the gauntlet to any theory that jumps too quickly
from a basic system for “motivation” to the human brain’s capacity to integrate
rich cognitions with subtle emotions. How do we get from a basic
system of neuromodulators (Kelley, Chapter 3), reward and punishment
(Rolls, Chapter 5) or behavioral fear (Fellous & LeDoux, Chapter 4) to these
nuanced emotions that humans experience? This question is addressed below,
under An Evolutionary Approach to Heated Appraisals. The following section
will present evolutionary stories (or essays in comparative cognitive neuroscience)
for the diversity of vision and for the expansion of communication
to include language in the perspective offered later, under From Drives to
Feelings. These insights will then serve to anchor a fresh look at the issue of
robot emotions under Emotion without Biology.
Following each excerpt from the narrative, I offer a sequence of mental
states and events, without teasing out the overlapping of various segments.
The notion x will denote the experience of the emotional state x, by which I
mean a reportable experience in which emotional feelings play an important
role. The challenge (to be only partially met below) is to understand the iceberg
of which such experiences are but the tip. Each sequence is followed by
a few comments relevant to any later attempt to explain the underlying neural
dynamics. These comments constitute an a posteriori reconstruction of what
went on in my head at the time: there is no claim that the suggested interpretations
are complete, and similar emotional behaviors and experiences might
well have quite different causes in different circumstances.
1. I phoned N’s secretary and learned that she had forgotten to confirm
the meeting with N. I was not particularly upset, we rescheduled the
meeting for 4 P.M. the next day, and I proceeded to make contented
use of the unexpected free time to catch up on my correspondence.
Hope for success of the meeting → Expected meeting not
confirmed → mild annoyance → meeting rescheduled; good use
of free time → annoyance dissipated ; contentment (1)