Feb 20, 2011 -- 7:47PM, TemplarS wrote:

Maybe Antonio Damasio might have something.  He believes that emotions cannot be ignored in a full understanding of consciousness and mental processes.

He's absolutely correct. The research that's been done with people literally unable to feel emotion (usually due to brain damage) shows that our decision-making process is actually based far more in emotion than reason. Those without the capacity for emotion tend to become completely indecisive, unable to make any decision without huge amounts of prompting which suggests that we are far more emotional beings than rational ones and further, that much of our "rational" reasoning is actually self-justification after the fact.

How you create a computer capable of feeling emotion (short of rigging up a rudimentry limbic system) is beyond me.