This post combines two ideas - the world model and emotion.
In the 2017 paper World Models, David Ha & Jürgen Schmidhuber introduce an agent that learns from compressed representations of its environment.
These representations are world models. These world models are limited - no world model can include all possible relevant information.
World models use a limited amount of concepts and relationships to represent the world as a basis for decision making.
In the book How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett proposes that emotions are concepts developed on the fly.
This proposal stands in contrast to the more popular belief that emotions are hardwired and universal. Instead, emotions are constructed through our experiences and interpretations of the world around us.
This process, known as the theory of constructed emotion, posits that our emotional experiences are shaped by our cultural, social, and personal contexts, as well as our individual learning histories.
We can combine these two ideas together to form the idea of an emotional world model.
An emotion is a learned concept that helps us to understand the world. It’s as much a function of the world as of us.
Rather than thinking about emotion as a common thing we all share inside our heads, instead think about emotion as a personal representation of the world itself.