Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

368 conclusions
by an interest in understanding the nature of addiction—perhaps another
aspect of the “beware the passionate robot” theme. As she documents in her
section Addictive Drugs and Artificial Stimulation of Emotions, these systems
may have great adaptive value in certain contexts yet may be maladaptive
in others. This raises the intriguing question of whether the effects of
neuromodulation could be more adaptive for the animal if the rather largescale
“broadcast” of a few neuromodulators were replaced by a targeted and
more information-rich distribution of a far more diverse set of neuromodulators.
This makes little sense in terms of the conservatism of biological evolution
but may have implications both for the design of drugs which modify
neuromodulators to target only cells with specific molecular markers and in
future research on robot emotions which seeks to determine useful computational
and technological analogs for neuromodulation.
Emotion and Consciousness with a Nod to Empathy
With this, let us turn to notions of the linkage between emotion and consciousness.
Fellous and LeDoux (Chapter 4) endorse theories of consciousness
built around the concept of working memory. They say
the feeling of being afraid would be a state of consciousness in which
working memory integrates the following disparate kinds of information:
(1) an immediately present stimulus (say, a snake on the
path in front of you); (2) long-term memories about that stimulus
(facts you know about snakes and experiences you have had with
them); and (3) emotional arousal by the amygdala.
However, we saw that activity in the parietal cortex may have no access to
consciousness (patient D. F.), even though (Fig. 12.1) it is coupled to prefrontal
working memory. Thus, working memory is not the key to consciousness;
but if we agree to simply accept that some cortical circuits support
conscious states while others do not, then we can still agree with Fellous
and LeDoux as to the importance of emotional feelings of connections from
the amygdala to the medial (anterior cingulate) and ventral (orbital) prefrontal
cortex. As they (and Rolls) note, humans with orbitofrontal cortex
damage ignore social and emotional cues and make poor decisions, and some
may even exhibit sociopathic behavior. They stress that, in addition to being
connected with the amygdala, the anterior cingulate and orbital areas
are intimately connected with one another as well as with the lateral prefrontal
cortex, and each of the prefrontal areas receives information from
sensory processing regions and from areas involved in various aspects of
implicit and explicit memory processing.