ONE type of naturalistic analysis of words like "good," "ought," and "better" defines them in terms of criteria for applicability which vary from one context to another (as in "good men," "good typewriter," "good method of proof"), so that their meanings vary with context. Dissatisfaction with this "crude" naturalism leads some philosophers to suggest that the words have a context-independent non-descriptive meaning defined in terms of such things as expressing emotions, commanding, persuading, or guiding actions.

There are well-known objections to both approaches, and the aim of this paper is to suggest an alternative which has apparently never previously been considered, for the very good reason that at first sight it looks so unpromising, namely the alternative of defining the problematic words as logical constants.

This should not be confused with the programme of treating them as undefined symbols in a formal system, which is not new. In this essay an attempt will be made to define a logical constant "Better" which has surprisingly many of the features of the ordinary word "better" in a large number of contexts. It can then be shown that other important uses of "better" may be thought of as derived from this use of the word as a logical constant.

The new symbol is a logical constant in that its definition (i.e., the specification of formation rules and truth-conditions for statements using it) makes use only of such concepts as "entailment," "satisfying a condition," "relation," "set of properties," which would generally be regarded as purely logical concepts. In particular, the definition makes no reference to wants, desires, purposes, interests, prescriptions, choice, non-descriptive uses of language, and the other paraphernalia of non-naturalistic (and some naturalistic) analyses of evaluative words.

(However, some of those 'paraphernalia' can be included in arguments/subjects to which the complex relational predicate 'better' is applied.)

This is a sequel to the 1969 paper on "How to derive 'Better' from 'Is'". It presupposes the analysis of 'better' in the earlier paper, and argues that statements using the word 'ought' say something about which of a collection of alternatives is better than the others, in contrast with statements using 'must' or referring to 'obligations', or what is 'obligatory'. The underlying commonality between superficially different statements like 'You should take an umbrella with you' and 'The sun should come out soon' is explained, along with some other philosophical puzzles, e.g. concerning why 'ought' does not imply 'can', contrary to what some philosophers have claimed.

Originally a Cognitive Science Research Paper at Sussex University:
Sloman, Aaron and Monica Croucher, "You don't need a soft skin to have a warm heart: towards a computational analysis of motives and emotions," CSRP 004, 1981.
(Written circa 1980-81, at Sussex University: CSRP 004, 1981.)

This was submitted unsuccessfully to Behavioural and Brain Sciences Journal.

Abstract:

Emotions involve complex processes produced by interactions between motives, beliefs, percepts, etc. E.g. real or imagined fulfilment or violation of a motive, or triggering of a 'motive-generator', can disturb processes produced by other motives. To understand emotions, therefore, we need to understand motives and the types of processes they can produce. This leads to a study of the global architecture of a mind. Some constraints on the evolution of minds are discussed. Types of motives and the processes they generate are sketched.

(Note we now use slightly different terminology from that used in this paper. In particular, what the paper labelled as "intensity" we now call "insistence", i.e. the capacity to divert attention from other things.)

NB
This paper is often misquoted as arguing that robots (or at least intelligent robots) should have emotions. On the contrary, the paper argues that certain sorts of high level disturbances (i.e. emotional states) will be capable of arising out of interactions between mechanisms that exist for other reasons. Similarly 'thrashing' is capable of occurring in multi-processing operating systems that support swapping and paging, but that does not mean that operating systems should produce thrashing.

A more recent analysis of the confused but fashionable arguments (e.g. based on Damasio's writings) claiming that emotions are needed for intelligence can be found in this semi-popular presentation.

One of the arguments is analogous to arguing that a car requires a functioning horn for its starter motor to work, because damaging the battery can disable the horn and disable the starter motor.

1982

Abstract:

1987

Ordinary language makes rich and subtle distinctions between different sorts of mental states and processes such as mood, emotion, attitude, motive, character, personality, and so on. Our words and concepts have been honed for centuries against the intricacies of real life under pressure of real needs and therefore give deep hints about the human mind. Yet actual usage is inconsistent, and our ability to articulate the distinctions we grasp and use intuitively is as limited as our ability to recite rules of English syntax. Words like "motive" and "emotion" are used in ambiguous and inconsistent ways. The same person will tell you that love is an emotion, that she loves her children deeply, and that she is not in an emotional state. Many inconsistencies can be explained away if we rephrase the claims using carefully defined terms. As scientists we need to extend colloquial language with theoretically grounded terminology that can be used to mark distinctions and describe possibilities not normally discerned by the populace. For instance, we'll see that love is an attitude, not an emotion, though deep love can easily trigger emotional states. In the jargon of philosophers (Ryle 1949), attitudes are dispositions, emotions are episodes, though with dispositional elements. For a full account of these episodes and dispositions we require a theory about how mental states are generated and controlled and how they lead to action -- a theory about the mechanisms of mind. The theory should explain how internal representations are built up, stored, compared, and used to make inferences, formulate plans or control actions. Outlines of a theory are given. Design constraints for intelligent animals or machines are sketched, then design solutions are related to the structure of human motivation and to computational mechanisms underlying familiar emotional states.

1990

Invited paper presented, Nov 1990, to NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Computational theories of communication and their applications: Problems and Prospects".
Originally available as Cognitive Science Research Paper, CSRP-91-05, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham.

Abstract:
As a step towards comprehensive computer models of communication, and effective human machine dialogue, some of the relationships between communication and affect are explored. An outline theory is presented of the architecture that makes various kinds of affective states possible, or even inevitable, in intelligent agents, along with some of the implications of this theory for various communicative processes. The model implies that human beings typically have many different, hierarchically organised, dispositions capable of interacting with new information to produce affective states, distract attention, interrupt ongoing actions, and so on. High "insistence" of motives is defined in relation to a tendency to penetrate an attention filter mechanism, which seems to account for the partial loss of control involved in emotions. One conclusion is that emulating human communicative abilities will not be achieved easily. Another is that it will be even more difficult to design and build computing systems that reliably achieve interesting communicative goals.

BeaudoinSloman-1991-proposalForStudyOfMotiveProcessing.pdf
Title: A Proposal for a Study of Motive Processing
Authors: Luc Beaudoin and Aaron Sloman
Date: 1991
Date Installed here: 30 Jan 2016

Where published: PhD Thesis proposal Luc Beaudoin, University of Birmingham

Abstract:

This paper was mostly written by the first author, although it is based on and develops ideas of the second author. The nursemaid scenario was first described by the second author (Sloman, 1986). At the time of writing Luc Beaudoin was in the process of implementing the model described in the paper.

In this paper we discuss some of the essential features and context of human motive processing, and we characterize some of the state transitions of motives. We then describe in detail a domain for designing an agent exhibiting some of these features. Recent related work is briefly reviewed to demonstrate the need for extending theories to account for the complexities of motive processing described here.

The nursemaid scenario is available at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/nursemaid-scenario.html

Luc's work growing out of this proposal, and his thesis, are referenced below. Search for "Beaudoin".

Seminar notes for the Attention and Affect Project, later re-named Cognition and Affect, summarising its long term objectives better.

Many people who favour the design-based approach to the study of mind, including the author previously, have thought of the mind as a computational system, though they don't all agree regarding the forms of computation required for mentality. Because of ambiguities in the notion of 'computation' and also because it tends to be too closely linked to the concept of an algorithm, it is suggested in this paper that we should rather construe the mind (or an agent with a mind) as a control system involving many interacting control loops of various kinds, most of them implemented in high level virtual machines, and many of them hierarchically organised. (Some of the sub-processes are clearly computational in character, though not necessarily all.) A feature of the system is that the same sensors and motors are shared between many different functions, and sometimes they are shared concurrently, sometimes sequentially. A number of implications are drawn out, including the implication that there are many informational substates, some incorporating factual information, some control information, using diverse forms of representation. The notion of architecture, i.e. functional differentiation into interacting components, is explained, and the conjecture put forward that in order to account for the main characteristics of the human mind it is more important to get the architecture right than to get the mechanisms right (e.g. symbolic vs neural mechanisms). Architecture dominates mechanism.
(In 2018 I began to revise this opinion because of problems of explaining deep ancient mathematical competences by means of computer models: here.)

in Proceedings AISB93, published by IOS Press as a book: Prospects for Artificial Intelligence
Editors: A.Sloman, D.Hogg, G.Humphreys, D. Partridge, A. Ramsay

1. Introduction
2. Work to be done
3. Approaches to the study of mind
3.1. Semantics-based approaches to the study of mind
3.2. Phenomena-based approaches to the study of mind
3.3. Design-based approaches to the study of mind

(a) Analysis of requirements for an autonomous intelligent agent.
(b) A design specification for a working system meeting the requirements in (a).
(c) A detailed implementation or implementation specification for a working
system.
(d) Theoretical analysis of how the design specification and the
implementational details ensure or fail to ensure satisfaction of the
requirements.
(e) Analysis of the neighbourhood in `design-space'.

We outline a design based theory of motive processing and attention, including: multiple motivators operating asynchronously, with limited knowledge, processing abilities and time to respond. Attentional mechanisms address these limits using processes differing in complexity and resource requirements, in order to select which motivators to attend to, how to attend to them, how to achieve those adopted for action and when to do so. A prototype model is under development. Mechanisms include: motivator generators, attention filters, a dispatcher that allocates attention, and a manager. Mechanisms like these might explain the partial loss of control of attention characteristic of many emotional states.

Abstract:
The research community is full of papers with titles that include terms like 'emotion', 'motivation', 'cognition', and 'attention'. However when these terms are used they are either considered to be so obvious as not to warrant a definition, or are defined in overly simplistic and arbitrary ways. The reasons behind our usage of existing terminology is easy to see, but the problems inherent with it are not. The use of such terminology gives rise to a whole set of problems, chief among them are confusion and pointless semantic disagreement. These problems occur because the current terminology is too vague, and burdened with acquired meaning. We need to replace it with terminology that emerges from a putatively complete theory of the conceptual space of mechanisms and behaviours, spanning several functional levels (e.g.: neural, behavioural and computational). Research that attempts to use the current terminology to build larger and more complex theory, just adds to the existing confusion. In this paper I examine the reasons behind the use of current terminology, explore the problems inherent with it, and offer a way to resolve these problems. The days when one small research team could hope to produce a theory to explain the complete range of phenomena currently referred to as being 'emotional' have passed. It is time for concerted and coordinated activity to understand the relation of mechanisms to behaviour. This will give rise to clear and unambiguous terminology that is defined at different functional levels. Until the current terminological problems are solved, our rate of progress will be slow.

Aaron.Sloman_isre.pdf
Title: Computational Modelling Of Motive-Management Processes
"Poster" prepared for the Conference of the International Society for Research in Emotions, Cambridge July 1994.
Authors: Aaron Sloman, Luc Beaudoin and Ian Wright
Revised version in Proceedings ISRE94, edited by Nico Frijda, ISRE Publications.
Date: 29 July 1994 (PDF version added here 25 Dec 2005)

Abstract:
This is a 5 page summary with three diagrams of the main objectives and some work in progress at the University of Birmingham Cognition and Affect project. involving: Professor Glyn Humphreys (School of Psychology), and Luc Beaudoin, Chris Paterson, Tim Read, Edmund Shing, Ian Wright, Ahmed El-Shafei, and (from October 1994) Chris Complin (research students). The project is concerned with "global" design requirements for coping simultaneously with coexisting but possibly unrelated goals, desires, preferences, intentions, and other kinds of motivators, all at different stages of processing. Our work builds on and extends seminal ideas of H.A.Simon (1967). We are exploring "broad and shallow" architectures combining varied capabilities most of which are not implemented in great depth. The poster summarises some ideas about management and meta-management processes, attention filtering, and the relevance to emotional states involved "perturbances", where there is partial loss of control of attention.

This work aims to implement a prototype agent architecture that meets the requirements for self-referential systems, and is able to exhibit perturbant ('emotional') states, detect such states and attempt to do something about them. Results from this research will contribute to autonomous agent design, emotionality, internal perception and meta-level control; in particular, it is hoped that we will
i. provide a (partial) implementation of Sloman's theory of perturbances (Sloman, 81) within the NML1 design (Beaudoin, 94),
ii. investigate the requirements for the self-detection and control of processing states, and
iii. demonstrate the adaptiveness of, the need for, and consequences of, self-control mechanisms that meet the requirements for self-referential systems.

Date: Oct 1995 (published 1996)

Appeared (with commentaries) in Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology, vol 3 no 2, 1996, pp 101--126.

Journal web site: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/v003/3.2wright01.html

The commentaries, by

• Dan Lloyd,
• Cristiano Castelfranchi and Maria Miceli
• Margaret Boden

are available here, followed by a reply by the authors:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/toc/ppp3.2.html

(This is a revised version of the paper presented to the Geneva Emotions Workshop, April 1995, entitled
"The Architectural Basis for Grief".)

Abstract:

The design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analysed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group.

We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention).

The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of 'perturbant', emotional episodes.

Abstract:
Which agent architectures are capable of justifying descriptions in terms of the 'higher level' mental concepts applicable to human beings? We propose a new kind of architecture-based semantics for mentalistic descriptions in which mental concepts (e.g. 'believes', 'desires', 'intends', 'mood', 'emotion', etc.) are grounded in assumptions about information processing architectures, and not merely in concepts based solely on Dennett's 'intentional stance'. These ideas have led to the design of the SIM_AGENT toolkit which has been used to explore a variety of such architectures.

Abstract:

The autonomy of a system can be defined as its capability to recover from unforeseen difficulties without any user intervention. This thesis proposal addresses a small part of this problem, namely the detection of anomalies within a system's own operation by the system itself. It is a response to a challenge presented by immune systems which can distinguish between "self " and "nonself ", i.e. they can recognise a "foreign" pattern (due to a virus or bacterium) as different from those associated with the organism itself, even if the pattern was not previously encountered. The aim is to apply this requirement to an artificial system, where "nonself " may be any form of deliberate intrusion or random anomalous behaviour due to a fault. When designing reflective architectures or self-diagnostic systems, it is simpler to rely on a single coordination mechanism to make the system work as intended. However, such a coordination mechanism cannot be inspected or repaired by the system itself, which means that there is a gap in its reflective coverage. To try to overcome this limitation, this thesis proposal suggests a conceptual frame-work based on a network of agents where each agent monitors the whole network from a unique and independent perspective and where the perspectives are not globally "managed". Each agent monitors the fault-detection capability and control algorithms of other agents (a process called meta-observation). In this way, the agents can collectively achieve reflective coverage of failures.

Abstract:
Patrice Terrier asks and Aaron Sloman attempts to answer questions about AI, about emotions, about the relevance of philosophy to AI, about Poplog, Sim_agent and other tools.
(EACE = European Association for Cognitive Ergonomics)

Abstract:
A problem which bedevils the study of emotions, and the study of consciousness, is that we assume a shared understanding of many everyday concepts, such as 'emotion', 'feeling', 'pleasure', 'pain', 'desire', 'awareness', etc. Unfortunately, these concepts are inherently very complex, ill-defined, and used with different meanings by different people. Moreover this goes unnoticed, so that people think they understand what they are referring to even when their understanding is very unclear. Consequently there is much discussion that is inherently vague, often at cross-purposes, and with apparent disagreements that arise out of people unwittingly talking about different things. We need a framework which explains how there can be all the diverse phenomena that different people refer to when they talk about emotions and other affective states and processes. The conjecture on which this paper is based is that adult humans have a type of information-processing architecture, with components which evolved at different times, including a rich and varied collection of components whose interactions can generate all the sorts of phenomena that different researchers have labelled "emotions". Within this framework we can provide rational reconstructions of many everyday concepts of mind. We can also allow a variety of different architectures, found in children, brain damaged adults, other animals, robots, software agents, etc., where different architectures support different classes of states and processes, and therefore different mental ontologies. Thus concepts like 'emotion', 'awareness', etc. will need to be interpreted differently when referring to different architectures. We need to limit the class of architectures under consideration, since for any class of behaviours there are indefinitely many architectures which can produce those behaviours. One important constraint is to consider architectures which might have been produced by biological evolution. This leads to the notion of a human architecture composed of many components which evolved under the influence of the other components as well as environmental needs and pressures. From this viewpoint, a mind is a kind of {\em ecosystem} (previously described as an 'ecology') of co-evolved sub-organisms acquiring and using different kinds of information and processing it in different ways, sometimes cooperating with one another and sometimes competing. Within this framework we can hope to study not only mechanisms underlying affective states and processes, but also other mechanisms which are often studied in isolation, e.g. vision, action mechanisms, learning mechanisms, 'alarm' mechanisms, etc. We can also explain why some models, and corresponding conceptions of emotion, are shallow whereas others are deeper. Shallow models may be of practical use, e.g. in entertainment and interface design. Deeper models are required if we are to understand what we are, how we can go wrong, etc. This paper is a snapshot of a long term project addressing all these issues.

Abstract:

An overview of some of the motivation of our research and design criteria for the SIM_AGENT toolkit for a special issue of CACM on multi-agent systems, edited by Anupam Joshi and Munindar Singh. Includes an insert by users: Jeremy Baxter and Richard Hepplewhite.

For more information about the toolkit (now referred to as SimAgent), including movies of demos, see
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/packages/simagent.html

Abstract:
This paper, an expanded version of a talk on love given to a literary society, attempts to analyse some of the architectural requirements for an agent which is capable of having primary, secondary and tertiary emotions, including being infatuated or in love. It elaborates on work done previously in the Birmingham Cognition and Affect group, describing our proposed three level architecture (with reactive, deliberative and meta-management layers), showing how different sorts of emotions relate to those layers.

Some of the relationships between emotional states involving partial loss of control of attention (e.g. emotional states involved in being in love) and other states which involve dispositions (e.g. attitudes such as loving) are discussed and related to the architecture.

The work of poets and playwrights can be shown to involve an implicit commitment to the hypothesis that minds are (at least) information processing engines. Besides loving, many other familiar states and processes such as seeing, deciding, wondering whether, hoping, regretting, enjoying, disliking, learning, planning and acting all involve various sorts of information processing.

By analysing the requirements for such processes to occur, and relating them to our evolutionary history and what is known about animal brains, and comparing this with what is being learnt from work on artificial minds in artificial intelligence, we can begin to formulate new and deeper theories about how minds work, including how we come to think about qualia, many forms of learning and development, and results of brain damage or abnormality.

But there is much prejudice that gets in the way of such theorising, and also much misunderstanding because people construe notions of "information processing" too narrowly.

Title:Evolvable architectures for human-like minds
Authors: Aaron Sloman and Brian Logan
Invited talk at 13th Toyota Conference, on "Affective Minds" Nagoya Japan, Nov-Dec 1999
Published in Affective Minds, Ed. Giyoo Hatano, Elsevier, October 2000
Abstract:
There are many approaches to the study of mind, and much ambiguity in the use of words like 'emotion' and 'consciousness'. This paper adopts the design stance, in an attempt to understand human minds as information processing virtual machines with a complex multi-level architecture whose components evolved at different times and perform different sorts of functions. A multi-disciplinary perspective combining ideas from engineering as well as several sciences helps to constrain the proposed architecture. Variations in the architecture should accommodate infants and adults, normal and pathological cases, and also animals. An analysis of states and processes that each architecture supports provides a new framework for systematically generating concepts of various kinds of mental phenomena. This framework can be used to refine and extend familiar concepts of mind, providing a new, richer, more precise theory-based collection of concepts. Within this unifying framework we hope to explain the diversity of definitions and theories and move towards deeper explanatory theories and more powerful and realistic artificial models, for use in many applications, including education and entertainment.

Abstract:

A major new robotic project funded by the EC started in September 2004
CoSy: Cognitive systems for cognitive assistants

More recent changes:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/#overview
New architecture diagram, showing overlaps between input, output, and "central" components of the architecture:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/vm-functionalism.html
(also PDF)

Advances in autonomous agent technology have resulted in the potential for implementations of multiple agents to act as psychological theories of complex social and affective phenomena. Simulating attachment behaviours in infancy provides a relatively simple starting point for this type of theory development. The presence of neurophysiological, psychological and other types of data facilitates the validation of architectural theories by constraining these architectures at multiple levels. A seven part design process is described which details how requirements are specified and how design, implementation and evaluation processes are carried out. Two competing theories are proposed, one that involves some deliberation and one that is reactive only.

In Who Needs Emotions?: The Brain Meets the Robot,
Eds. M. Arbib and J-M. Fellous, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 2005, pp. 203--244

Abstract:
Much discussion of emotions and related topics is riddled with confusion because different authors use the key expressions with different meanings. Some confuse the concept of "emotion" with the more general concept of "affect", which covers other things besides emotions, including moods, attitudes, desires, preferences, intentions, dislikes, etc. Moreover researchers have different goals: some are concerned with understanding natural phenomena, while others are more concerned with producing useful artefacts, e.g. synthetic entertainment agents, sympathetic machine interfaces, and the like. We address this confusion by showing how "architecture-based" concepts can extend and refine our pre-theoretical concepts in ways that make them more useful both for expressing scientific questions and theories, and for specifying engineering objectives. An implication is that different information-processing architectures support different classes of emotions, different classes of consciousness, different varieties of perception, and so on. We start with high level concepts applicable to a wide variety of types of natural and artificial systems, including very simple organisms, namely concepts such as "need", "function", "information-user", "affect", "information-processing architecture". For more complex architectures, we offer the CogAff schema as a generic framework which distinguishes types of components that may be in a architecture, operating concurrently with different functional roles. We also sketch H-Cogaff, a richly-featured special case of CogAff, conjectured as a type of architecture that can explain or replicate human mental phenomena. We show how the concepts that are definable in terms of such architectures can clarify and enrich research on human emotions. If successful for the purposes of science and philosophy the architecture is also likely to be useful for engineering purposes, though many engineering goals can be achieved using shallow concepts and shallow theories, e.g., producing "believable" agents for computer entertainments. The more human-like robot emotions will emerge, as they do in humans, from the interactions of many mechanisms serving different purposes, not from a particular, dedicated "emotion mechanism".

---

There is a summary of a review by Zack Lynch here.
"Rather than building on the hype surrounding thinking machines the book provides a superb scientific analysis of the current state of emotions research in animals, humans and man-made systems." .... "While technical in parts, this book is an important contribution to the emerging field of emotional neurotechnology. It is a stimulating book that is well edited and researched. I highly recommend Who Needs Emotions? for researchers and graduate students across neuroscience and computer science."

Where published:

Originally published as an invited paper in:
Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, American Philosophical Association,
(Including Newsletter index)
This paper was published in issue 09, 1, pp. 10--13:
(PDF) version of whole newsletter
www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/EADE8D52-8D02-4136-9A2A-729368501E43/v09n1Computers.pdf
(Now partly out of date: see later local version, above.)

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (2.3.3.4), 1739-1740 (http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/ToC/hume%20treatise%20ToC.htm)

Whatever Hume may have meant by this, and whatever various commentators may have taken him to mean, I claim that there is at least one interpretation in which this statement is obviously true, namely: no matter what factual information an animal or machine A contains, and no matter what competences A has regarding abilities to reason, to plan, to predict, or to explain, A will not actually do anything unless it has, in addition, some sort of control mechanism that selects among the many alternative processes that A's information and competences can support.

In short: control mechanisms are required in addition to factual information and reasoning mechanisms if A is to do anything. This paper is about what forms of control are possible and their relative merits. In at least some cases there are pre-existing motives, and the control arises out of selection of a motive for action. That raises the question where motives come from. My answer is that they can be generated and selected in different ways, but one way is not itself motivated: it merely involves the operation of mechanisms, based on evolutionary heritage, in the architecture of A, that generate motives and select some of them for action. They could be described as generated by "motivational reflexes" that are directly or indirectly products of our evolutionary heritage. They are valuable because their activation leads to acquisition of information even when there is no need for that information at the time, and the individual has no reason to believe the information will be useful at some time in the future.

The view I wish to oppose is that all motives must somehow serve the current interests of A, or be rewarding for A. This view is widely held and is based on a lack of imagination about possible designs for working systems. I summarize it as the assumption that all motivation must be reward-based. In contrast, I claim that at least some motivation may be architecture-based, in the sense explained in the paper.
The architecture-based motivation theory is consistent with the theory of the "Meta-configured Genome", developed in collaboration with Jackie Chappell, Biosciences, University of Birmingham, and summarised here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-configured-genome.html

Since the publication of the book Descartes' Error in 1994 by Antonio Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, it has become very fashionable to claim that emotions are necessary for intelligence. I think the claim is confused and the arguments presented for it fallacious.

Part of the problem is that many of the words we use for describing human mental states and processes (including 'emotion' and 'intelligence') are far too ill-defined to be useful in scientific theories. Nevertheless there are many people who LIKE the idea that emotions, often thought of as inherently irrational, are required for higher forms of intelligence, the suggestion being that rationality is not all it's cracked up to be. But wishful thinking is not a good basis for advancing scientific understanding.

Another manifestation of wishful thinking is people attributing to me opinions that are the opposite of what I have written in things they claim to have read.

So I propose that we investigate, in a dispassionate way, the variety of design options for minds, whether in animals (including humans) or machines, and try to understand the trade-offs between different ways of assembling systems that survive in a complex and changing environment. This can lead to a new science of mind in which the rough-hewn concepts of ordinary language (including garden-gate gossip and poetry) are shown not to be wrong or useless, but merely stepping stones to a richer, deeper, collection of ways of thinking about what sorts of machines we are, and might be.

This is a summary of some of the ideas in my invited talk for the Symposium on "Computational modelling of emotion: theory and applications" at AISB 2017. A deep understanding of human (or animal) minds requires a broad and deep understanding of the types of information processing functions and information processing mechanisms produced by biological evolution, and how those functions and mechanisms are combined in architectures of increasing sophistication and complexity over evolutionary trajectories leading to new species, and how various kinds of evolved potential are realised by context-sensitive mechanisms during individual development. Some aspects of individual development add context-specific detail to products of the evolutionary history, partly because evolution cannot produce pre-packaged specifications for complete information processing architectures, except for the very simplest organisms. Instead, for more complex organisms, including humans, different architectural layers develop at different times during an individual's life, partly under the influence of the genome and partly under the influence of what the individual has so far experienced, learnt, and developed. This is particularly obvious in language development in humans, but that is a special case of a general biological pattern (identified in joint work with Jackie Chappell, partly inspired by theories of Annette Karmiloff-Smith, among others). This paper complements a paper presented in the Symposium on Computing and Philosophy at AISB 2017, which develops more general ideas about evolution of information processing functions and mechanisms, partly inspired by Turing's work on morphogenesis:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/sloman-aisb17-CandP.pdf

The workshop summarised here was held on Monday afternoon 24th April 2017. People who had attended or communicated about the workshop were invited to submit comments related to the discussion at the workshop or the document on anger mentioned in the workshop "homework":
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/cogaff-sem-apr-2017.html#homework