A comparison of naturalist and antinaturalist explanations for why people consider robots animate and experience emotions towards them

Abstract

An interesting aspect of love and sex (and other types of interactions) with robots is that human beings often treat robots as animate and express emotions towards them. In this paper, we discuss two interpretations of why people experience emotions towards robots and tend to treat them as animate: naturalistic and antinaturalistic. We first provide a set of examples that illustrate human beings considering robots animate and experiencing emotions towards them. We then identify, reconstruct and compare naturalist and antinaturalist accounts of these attitudes and point out the functions and limitations of these accounts. Finally, we argue that in the case of emotional and ‘animating’ human–robot interactions, naturalist and antinaturalist accounts should be – as they most often are – considered complementary rather than competitive or contradictory.