Emotions are often misunderstood as irrational disturbances or cultural constructs, but this paper presents them as evolutionarily engineered value signals and motivational amplifiers within a survival goal framework. Emotions tag survival-relevant states with urgency and valence, scaling simple reinforcement learning into complex affective dynamics that prioritize negative signals (threats,...
The dominant paradigm in artificial general intelligence (AGI) research equates intelligence with behavioral generality achieved through massive scaling of stateless, disembodied architectures. This paper argues that such approaches are structurally incapable of producing phenomenal consciousness (qualia), the subjective “what it is like” of experience, because they lack the evolutionary...