The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind[1] is a 2006 book by cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky that elaborates and expands on Minsky's ideas as presented in his earlier book Society of Mind (1986).
Minsky argues that emotions are different ways to think that our mind uses to increase our intelligence.
His main argument is that emotions are "ways to think" for different "problem types" that exist in the world, and that the brain has rule-based mechanisms (selectors) that turn on emotions to deal with various problems.
[2] In a review for The Washington Post, neurologist Richard Restak states that:[3] Minsky does a marvelous job parsing other complicated mental activities into simpler elements.
But he is less effective in relating these emotional functions to what's going on in the brain.Minsky outlines the book as follows:[4]