Look at Damasio’s work, showing that emotion is necessary for full spectrum cognitive skill manifestation.
There is a way to arrive at this thru Damasio’s early work, which I don’t think is highlighted by saying that emotion is needed for human-level skill. His work in the 1980s was on “convergence zones”. These are hypothetical areas in the brain that are auto-associative networks (think a Hopfield network) with bi-directional connections to upstream sensory areas. His notion is that different sensory (and motor? I don’t remember now) areas recognize sense-specific patterns (e.g., the sound of a dog barking, the image of a dog, the word “dog”, the sound of the word “dog”, the movement one would make against an attacking dog), and the pattern these create in the convergence zone represents the concept “dog”.
This makes a lot of sense and has a lot of support from studies, but a consequence is that humans don’t use logic. A convergence zone is set there, in one physical hunk of brain, with no way to move its activation pattern around in the brain. That means that the brain’s representations do not use variables the way logic does. A pattern in a CZ might be represented by the variable X, and could take on different values such as the pattern for “dog”. But you can’t move that X around in equations or formuli. You would most likely have a hard-wired set of basic logic rules, and the concept “dog” as used on the left-hand side of a rule would be a different concept than the concept “dog” used on the right-hand side of the same rule.
Hence, emotions are important for humans, but this says nothing about whether emotions would be needed for an agent that could use logic.
There is a way to arrive at this thru Damasio’s early work, which I don’t think is highlighted by saying that emotion is needed for human-level skill. His work in the 1980s was on “convergence zones”. These are hypothetical areas in the brain that are auto-associative networks (think a Hopfield network) with bi-directional connections to upstream sensory areas. His notion is that different sensory (and motor? I don’t remember now) areas recognize sense-specific patterns (e.g., the sound of a dog barking, the image of a dog, the word “dog”, the sound of the word “dog”, the movement one would make against an attacking dog), and the pattern these create in the convergence zone represents the concept “dog”.
This makes a lot of sense and has a lot of support from studies, but a consequence is that humans don’t use logic. A convergence zone is set there, in one physical hunk of brain, with no way to move its activation pattern around in the brain. That means that the brain’s representations do not use variables the way logic does. A pattern in a CZ might be represented by the variable X, and could take on different values such as the pattern for “dog”. But you can’t move that X around in equations or formuli. You would most likely have a hard-wired set of basic logic rules, and the concept “dog” as used on the left-hand side of a rule would be a different concept than the concept “dog” used on the right-hand side of the same rule.
Hence, emotions are important for humans, but this says nothing about whether emotions would be needed for an agent that could use logic.