Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

eware the passionate robot 343
but this time with a special terminology to express it—from
communication as a general phenomenon among animals to language
as a specific form of communication among humans.
Note that it is not my point to say that English has made
the right absolute choices. I am simply observing that we do use
the term vision for the processing of focused patterns of variations
in light intensity whether in fly, octopus, bird, or human.
In each creature, vision is served by a network of interacting
mechanisms, but this network varies from species to species in
ways related to the animal’s ecological niche. What humans lack
in visual acuity they may make up for in visual processes for face
recognition and manual control. By contrast, although some
people will use the term language loosely for any form of communication,
most people will understand the sense of the claim
that “Humans are the only creatures that have language;” yet,
none would accept the claim that “Only humans have vision”
unless vision were used in the metaphorical sense of “the ability
to envision explicitly alternative futures and plan accordingly.”
3. Again, all these creatures are endowed with motivational systems—hunger,
thirst, fear, sex, etc.—and we may trace the linkage
of these systems with developing cortical mechanisms as we
trace our quasi-evolutionary sequence. However, are we to follow
the analogy with vision and refer to the processes involved
as “emotion” throughout, or should we instead follow the example
of communication and suggest that emotion provides in
some sense a special form of motivational system? Here, I do
not think there is the same consensus as there is for vision or
language. I choose the latter path, suggesting the following:
Motivation ≈ Communication
Emotion ≈ Language
There is this difference: whereas language seems to be restricted
to humans alone, emotion seems to be less clear-cut. Following
Darwin, we see expressions of emotion in dogs and monkeys,
even if most people would not credit them with the capability
for the emotional nuances of a Jane Austen heroine.
4. Much of the biological discussion of emotion has turned on the
distinction between “emotional behavior” and “emotional feelings.”
“Emotional expression” adds another dimension, where
mammalian (especially primate) facial expressions are understood
to signal the emotional state of the animal but distinguished
from the emotional behavior itself (e.g., a fearful expression is