Hearts as Q-Functions

How Feelings Run the Cost-Benefit Calculus

Formalizing the idea that emotions (especially moral ones) are multi-level value functions: how they encode 'good/bad' at the gene, agent, group, and institutional levels, and how RL-style learning lives in the brain.

"Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself."

— Martha Nussbaum