Customer Reviews

Who Needs Emotions?: The Brain Meets the Robot (Series in Affective Science)

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I've seldom been as challenged by the content of a book as by this one. It's a collection of twelve essays, of varying length and complexity, addressing issues of the architecture/software/operation of the brain - both the human and the artificial. The unifying questions are whether a scientific definition of 'emotions' can be formulated, what separates or unites emotions with intelligence, and whether artificial intelligence is meaningful without an emotional OS.

I've been reading one or another of these essays whenever I've felt bold enough for over a year. Some of them, with ferocious concentration, I've digested. Some have left me feeling remarkably stupid. In general, the essays of "Part II: Brains", written by psychologists and neurobiologists, have been digestible, but the essays of "Part II: Robots" might as well be written in Sanskrit.

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend this book! It's said in the pop medicine news of the Sunday papers that the surest preventative for mental decline of your aging (presumably human) brain is challenging exercise of your cerebral powers. If so, this book will forestall senility for a decade or more.