Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

eware the passionate robot 355
rather than as a director of action. In other cases, the précis of schema activity
plays the crucial role in determining the future course of schema activity
and, thus, of action.
FROM DRIVES TO FEELINGS
Our conceptual evolutionary analysis has allowed us to tease apart a variety
of visual mechanisms and relate them to a range of behaviors, from the
feeding and fleeing of the frog to the visual control of hand movements in
monkeys and humans. We briefly examined accounts of the evolution of
language and a particularly human type of consciousness. We saw that this
type of consciousness builds upon a more general form of consciousness—
awareness of both internal and external states—that we did not explain but
for which we made a crucial observation: activities in regions of the cerebral
cortex can differ in their access to awareness. However, although we
looked at visual processing involved in what some might label two “emotional
behaviors” in the frog—feeding and fleeing—we did not explicitly
discuss either motivation or emotion, beyond suggesting that nonhumans
may be aware of subtle social cues or the difference between feeling maternal
and feeling enraged and noting that nonhuman primates have a call
system and orofacial gestures expressive of a limited range of emotional
and related social indicators. The time has come to put these insights to
work. As stated above, some would use the term emotion to cover the whole
range of motivated behavior, whereas others (myself included) stress the
emergent subtlety of emotions. The following section will briefly review
an account of motivated behavior in toads and rats, then use this basis together
with the insights from the Jacksonian analysis above to offer an integrated
perspective on the evolutionary insights provided by Kelley, Rolls,
and Fellous & LeDoux in Chapters 3–5.
Basic Models of Motivation
Karl Pribram (1960) has quipped that the limbic system is responsible for
the “four Fs:” Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction. It is interesting
that three of the four have a strong social component. In any case, the notion
to be developed in this section is that the animal comes with a set of
basic drives—for hunger, thirst, sex, self-preservation, etc.—and that these
provide the basic motor, or motivation, for behavior. This will then ground
our subsequent discussion of motivation.