According to Wired, Marvin Minsky claims in “The Emotion Machine” that “anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling.”
In fact it’s exactly the reverse. Thoughts are a kind of feeling (namely, what it feels like to be processing certain information: understanding X, meaning Y, believing Z).
And there’s a world of difference between the two positions. Saying that feeling is just a kind of thinking (i.e., information-processing state) is saying nothing, because the fact that it is felt is precisely what makes whatever kind of “information-processing state” thought is different, and in special need of explanation.
In contrast, saying that thinking is a kind of feeling — though it certainly doesn’t explain feeling! — makes it quite clear that it’s not just feeling pinches and seeing pink that need explanation, but also thinking X.
Hence “thinking” cannot be used as an unexplicated bootstrap for explaining feeling: Just exactly what sort of thing conscious “thinking” is — as opposed to mere unconscious data-crunching — is part of the problem, not the solution!
Zounds, how insouciant people can be, in the ways they keep begging this particular question! Sometimes they don’t have the faintest understanding (only the feeling of understanding).
Which is yet another interesting property of cognition: There’s saying 2+2=4, understanding “2+2=4”, believing that “2+2=4” — and then there’s the further matter of whether 2+2 does indeed equal 4 (or whether snow is white, or F=ma, or april showers indeed bring may flowers…).
See: Harnad, S. (2001) Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer.