Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

eware the passionate robot 373
grip of passion, that is, of strong emotion. In other words, while our emotions
and our reason may usually be brought into accord, there are other
times when “ambition, avarice, desire, hope, fear, love, hatred, joy, grief,
anger, [or] revenge” may consume us, effectively banishing all alternatives
from our thoughts. In noting this, I frame the question “If emotions conveyed
an advantage in biological evolution, why can they be so harmful as
well?” We have already noted that Kelley (Chapter 3) examined the role of
opioids in addiction and discussed how these may have great adaptive value
in certain contexts yet may be maladaptive in others.
Such issues raise the prior question “Did emotions convey a selective
advantage?” and the subsequent questions “Are emotions a side effect of a
certain kind of cognitive complexity?” (which might imply that robots of a
certain subtlety will automatically have emotion as a side effect) and “Were
emotions the result of separate evolutionary changes, and if so, do their
advantages outweigh their disadvantages in a way that might make it appropriate
to incorporate them in robots (whether through explicit design or
selective pressure)?”
At the beginning of this chapter, we considered a scenario for a computer
designed to effectively teach some body of material to a human student
and saw that we might include “providing what a human will recognize as
a helpful emotional tone” to the list of criteria for successful program design.
However, there is no evolutionary sequence here as charted by the
neurobiologists—none of the serotonin or dopamine of Kelley, none of the
punishment and reward of Rolls, none of the “fear circuits” of Fellous &
LeDoux. This is not to deny that there can be an interesting study of “computer
evolution” from the switches of the ENIAC, to the punchcards of the
PDP11 to the keyboard to the use of the mouse and, perhaps, to the computer
that perceives and expresses emotions. My point here is simply that the
computer’s evolution to emotion will not have the biological grounding of
human emotion. The computer may use a model of the student’s emotions
yet may not be itself subject to, for example, reward or punishment. Intriguingly,
this is simulation with a vengeance—yet not simulation in the mirror
sense employed by Jeannerod in Chapter 6—the simulation is purely of “the
other,” not a reflection of the other back onto the self. In the same way, one
may have a model of a car to drive it without having an internal combustion
engine or wheels. Then we must ask if this is an argument against the simulation
theory of human emotion. This also points to a multilevel view. At one
level, the computer “just follows the program” and humans “just follow the
neural dynamics.” It is only a multilevel view that lets us single out certain
variables as drives. What does that imply for robot emotions?
Suppose, then, that we have a robot that simulates the appearance of
emotional behavior but has none of the “heated feeling” that governed so