The Emotion Machine

Read the first two chapters of The Emotion Machine, Minsky 2006. Chapter 1, “Falling in Love”, explains love in mechanical terms and argues that machines could possess the capacity to fall in love, simply by abandoning their critical faculties and forsaking most of their usual goals: “Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments.” Love is a state in which the usual questions and doubts about someone are suppressed. Minsky describes the emotions we usually associate with love: passion, devotion, allegiance, affection, companionship, connection, as a variety of processes, that once triggered, lead us to think in different ways:

When a person you know has fallen in love, it’s almost as though someone new has emerged--a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It’s almost as though a switch had been thrown and a different program has started to run. 

Minsky questions our understanding of loaded words such as emotion. We can’t learn much from a dictionary definition of  the word because a definition only hides what is really a “range of states” too complex to comprehend. He explains mood changes, say from angry to happy, as highly complex mental state changes. And mental states, in Minsky's theories of the mind, are based on the use of many small processes.

The idea of an instinct machine is introduced in this chapter. Minsky explains that three things happen inside an instinct machine: it knows how to recognize situations through sensors, it has some knowledge about how to react to them, and it uses muscles or motors to take action. In an instinct machine, sensors activate motors.

In trying to understand an emotion, an old question, what are emotions and thoughts? should be replaced by what processes are involved in an emotion?