Emotional thinking as the foundation of consciousness in artificial intelligence

Abstract

Current theories of artificial intelligence (AI) generally exclude human emotions. The idea at the core of such theories could be described as ‘cognition is computing’; that is, that human psychological and symbolic representations and the operations involved in structuring such representations in human thinking and intelligence can be converted by AI into a series of cognitive symbolic representations and calculations in a manner that simulates human intelligence. However, after decades of development, the cognitive computing doctrine has encountered many difficulties, both in theory and in practice; in particular, it is far from approaching real human intelligence. Real human intelligence runs through the whole process of the emotions. The core and motivation of rational thinking are derived from the emotions. Intelligence without emotion neither exists nor is meaningful. For example, the idea of ‘hot thinking’ proposed by Paul Thagard, a philosopher of cognitive science, discusses the mechanism of the emotions in human cognition and the thinking process. Through an analysis from the perspectives of cognitive neurology, cognitive psychology and social anthropology, this article notes that there may be a type of thinking that could be called ‘emotional thinking’. This type of thinking includes complex emotional factors during the cognitive processes. The term is used to refer to the capacity to process information and use emotions to integrate information in order to arrive at the right decisions and reactions. This type of thinking can be divided into two types according to the role of cognition: positive and negative emotional thinking. That division reflects opposite forces in the cognitive process. In the future, ‘emotional computing’ will cause an important acceleration in the development of AI consciousness. The foundation of AI consciousness is emotional computing based on the simulation of emotional thinking.