My current understanding of this, combining thoughts on subsumptive robotics and embodied cognition:
Emotional states aren't reified in the brain; they're reified in our physiology. When you're happy, or sad, or scared, or whatever else, that's not a fact about your brain; your brain is just perceiving a fact about your body. (A fact that it worked together with the body to create, but still.)
Think of the brain as the CPU and the body (muscular contraction levels, etc.) as RAM. The brain-as-CPU has registers (informational state held directly in the brain), but your emotions are not held directly in such registers. Emotional states are, instead, patterns of information in the body-as-RAM, that the brain-as-CPU (statelessly) perceives [loads from, polls] in an ongoing way. If the body-as-RAM is polled and shows a certain recognizable pattern of activations, then that is interpreted by the brain as a certain emotional state.
Both the brain-as-CPU and various body parts (devices on the bus) can write to the body-as-RAM. The brain-as-CPU will then notice that the "emotional state" that it reads from the body-as-RAM has changed, and may do something about it (reinforce the change, counteract it, etc.)
What you experience as the qualia of emotion, is the brain's perception of the body-as-RAM, the same one it uses to decide whether to "do something about it."
Emotional states aren't reified in the brain; they're reified in our physiology. When you're happy, or sad, or scared, or whatever else, that's not a fact about your brain; your brain is just perceiving a fact about your body. (A fact that it worked together with the body to create, but still.)
Think of the brain as the CPU and the body (muscular contraction levels, etc.) as RAM. The brain-as-CPU has registers (informational state held directly in the brain), but your emotions are not held directly in such registers. Emotional states are, instead, patterns of information in the body-as-RAM, that the brain-as-CPU (statelessly) perceives [loads from, polls] in an ongoing way. If the body-as-RAM is polled and shows a certain recognizable pattern of activations, then that is interpreted by the brain as a certain emotional state.
Both the brain-as-CPU and various body parts (devices on the bus) can write to the body-as-RAM. The brain-as-CPU will then notice that the "emotional state" that it reads from the body-as-RAM has changed, and may do something about it (reinforce the change, counteract it, etc.)
What you experience as the qualia of emotion, is the brain's perception of the body-as-RAM, the same one it uses to decide whether to "do something about it."