Unlike cognition, emotion was neglected by neurobiology for a long time.  But recently, encouraged by the discovery of neural bases of cognitive functions, neurobiologists seem to take an interest in the field of emotions. Why so late?

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Generally, when someone claims having  "psychic gifts" such as telepathy or premonition, no one really believes him .However a curious debate was launched by Daryl J. Bem, a professor of psychology at Cornell University about psychic faculties. He reports nine experiments, all inspired by well established tests in psychology, but the chronological order of steps was reversed to measure a possible faculty of precognition in the subjects.

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Whilst ruminating over any cognitive phenomena, I generally like to consider any conscious elements, even if I cannot determine any (preoccupied with the “hard problem” as I am). Phenomenology is such a delphic matter that it strikes me as most probable that there are many conscious experiences that are constitutive of various cognitive functions we may be aware of, but we have not made the connection to any defined conscious facet yet.  

The most recent of these cognitive phenomena that I have been reading about and trying to come to bears with is joint action. The question of the phenomenology of joint action has begun to be addressed, but only recently.

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Self regulation, according to Baumeister, is the self’s capacity for altering its behaviour.

It is the process by which people attempt to constrain unwanted urges in order to gain control of the incipient response. Regulation means change, especially change to bring behavior (or other states) into line with some standard such as an ideal or goal. Changing one’s behavior so as to follow rules, match ideals, or pursue goals is thus a (very useful) form of self-regulation. - Baumeister

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In 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese workman, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot [1]. He did not switch the robot properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot.

Despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 1981. Over the years people have been crushed, hit on the head, welded and even had molten aluminium poured over them by robots [2].

With robots getting more sophisticated and social, they increasingly move from their industrial cages into homes and workplaces. “Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” says Henrik Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm [2]. Should robots that are strong enough to injure people be allowed into homes? Is “system malfunction” a justifiable excuse for a robotic fighter plane that mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? And should robotic sex dolls resembling children be legally allowed?

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The fact that I have lost nearly-finished drafts of three blog posts on my tea-flooded computer made me decide to write a post inspired by  the topic already touched by many in here: The Extended Mind proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers..

Nowadays we rely on external storages of information and tools expanding our cognitive horizons more than ever. Computers, internet, calculators, smartphones are much more than any book ever was. Information is accessible in an instance, in very approachable forms.

The story about situation when my aunt was driving my dad to the airport and he suddenly screamed  “oh my god, I forgot my memory” and she thought that dad was going mad, but in fact he was only referring to the external hard-drive he unintentionally left at home, became a running-gag in my family.

But can we really legitimately put an equation mark between these amenities and our mind? I will not try to directly argue for or against this position right now, many have already done so. Instead, in this post I will try to introduce an idea going quite in the opposite direction that has been inspired by this approach.

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There is evidence to suggest that people get satisfaction from seeking revenge and seeing justice administered, even when the instrument administering the punishment is out of their control. A study conducted a few years ago by Tania Singer, City University London, using fMRI found that people showed less activity of pain related areas of the brain when “defectors” of a computer game were punished. Interestingly they found that men showed additionally more activation of reward related areas of the brain, such as the ventral striatum and the nucleus accumbens when seeing punishment administered. These brain areas are essential components of the dopamine reward pathway. This is the same neuronal pathway that also gets stimulated by all kinds of pleasure.

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We meet many traps in life. Also in Science.

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In a lot of cognitive studies, the term ‘representation’ is used.  It roughly means, “an internal symbol that represents the external reality”. This idea can be traced back to Aristotle. It states that mental states such as desires, beliefs, perceptions and imaginings have ‘intentionality’ prescribed to them, meaning that they are about or refer to things.

This idea grew with the advent of the digital and analogue computer. Computers were referred to as ‘giant brains’ and quickly an analogy was created. Human cognition was suddenly seen as something like a calculating engine, a way of interpreting symbols into meaningful objects that worked in a similar fashion to incorporating and manipulating symbolic information on a computer. Many people implicitly agree with this computational model, with the majority of people believing that the brains job is to take features from the outside world and make an internal syntactical representation of the information.

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“How to make a robot that feels” was a Keynote talk given by Kevin O’Regan at the 4^th International Conference on Cognitive Systems, CogSys 2010. During the talk O’Regan introduced the “hard” problem of consciousness and explained his sensorimotor approach to consciousness [1]. The ideas he tried to deliver are of special interest to artificial intelligence and machine consciousness researchers. 

Sooner or later, with the embodied robotics and artificial intelligence achieve more and more progress, there will be artificial agents that understand their environment, effectively socialize with humans and mainly have a notion of “self”. But will such agents feel anything?

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