Robot Affect: the Amygdala as Bloch Sphere

Abstract

In the design of artificially sentient robots, an obstacle always has been that conventional computers cannot really process information in parallel, whereas the human affective system is capable of producing experiences of emotional concurrency (e.g., happy and sad). Another schism that has been in the way is the persistent Cartesian divide between cognition and affect, whereas people easily can reflect on their emotions or have feelings about a thought. As an essentially theoretical exercise, we posit that quantum physics at the basis of neurology explains observations in cognitive emotion psychology from the belief that the construct of reality is partially imagined (Im) in the complex coordinate space C^3. We propose a quantum computational account to mixed states of reflection and affect, while transforming known psychological dimensions into the actual quantum dynamics of electromotive forces. As a precursor to actual simulations, we show examples of possible robot behaviors, using Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen circuits. Keywords: emotion, reflection, modelling, quantum computing