Architectural Requirements for Human-like Agents Both Natural and Artificial. (What sorts of machines can love?)

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 metamanagement 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 dmange 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. Architectural Requirements for Human-like Agents Both Natural and Artificial. (What sorts of machines can love?)