Minds have personalities - Emotion is the core

There are many models of mind, and many different exemplars of agent architectures. Some models of mind map onto computational designs and some agent architectures are capable of supporting different models of mind. Many agent architectures are competency-based designs related to tasks in specific domains (e.g. COG). The more general frameworks (e.g. ACT-R, AIS, SOAR) map across tasks and domains. A number of models for synthetic minds are based on analyses and observations of human minds. These types of agent architectures are capable of performing certain behaviour and cognitive competencies associated with a functioning mind. There is a problem with many of these approaches when they are applied to the design of a mind analogous in type to the human mind – there is no core to mind in any of these theories or designs other than an information processing architecture. As any specific architecture is applied to different domains, the information processing content (knowledge and behaviors) of the architecture changes wholesale. From the perspective of developing intelligent computational systems this is more than acceptable. From the perspective of developing functioning (human-like) minds this is problematic – these models are in effect emotionally autistic. If mind is an ongoing characteristic of an entity of a certain level of complexity and a mind is capable of moving through many different control states, from where do the control patterns that stabilize a mind as an ongoing (developing) personality emanate? Our current work on this theme presents an emotion-based core for mind. This work draws on evidence from neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. As an agent monitors its interactions within itself and relates these to tasks in its external environment, the impetus for change within itself (i.e. a need to learn) is manifested as an unwanted combination of emotions. Such a control state can lead to the generation of internal processes requiring the agent to modify its behavior or processes in some way. The modification of an agent’s internal environment is then described in terms of an emotion motivated mapping between its internal and external environments. Cognition and underlying processes are used to navigate the agent-oriented internal environment of emotion. It is suggested that personality traits are a manifestation of this emotion core. Personality becomes an emergent property of the cognitive architecture and its (pre-)disposition to concentrate on certain tasks and favour specific instances of control states. Personality traits affect and influence the different categories of cognitive and animated behavior. Moods arise from the interaction of current temporally-global niche roles (the favouring of certain aspects of emotion space) and temporally-local drives that reflect the current focus of the deliberative processing as perceived by the reflective layer. Temporally-global drives are those associated with the agent’s overall purpose related to its current, possible and desired niche spaces. Temporally-local drives are related to ephemeral states or events within the agent’s environment or itself. The (high-level) nicheseeking drives (or dispositions) together with the more orthodox control states bind the theoretical model together and allow a synthetic agent to become complete and exhibit a (non-shallow) personality.