[cantthinkofone]

If humanlike reasoning is the destination for AGI, there's more than just symbolic reasoning to factor in. Emotions are a huge control on human reasoning.

People essentially rely on emotions to make all their decisions. Emotions implicitly represent rapid-fire unconscious decision work.

Again the current popular understanding of the mind separates emotion from thinking. They are not distinct. Emotional processing is another kind of thinking, and it drives the show.

[visarga]

I see emotions as analogous to the value function in RL. It is essentially a prediction of future rewards based on current state and action plan. Artificial RL agents learn emotion as it is related to their tasks and environments.