  All self-active living beings need to solve the motivational problem: The
question what to do at any moment of their live. For humans and non-human
animals at least two distinct layers of motivational drives are known, the
primary needs for survival and the emotional drives leading to a wide range of
sophisticated strategies, such as explorative learning and socializing. Part of
the emotional layer of drives has universal facets, being beneficial in an
extended range of environmental settings. Emotions are triggered in the brain
by the release of neuromodulators, which are, at the same time, the agents for
meta-learning. This intrinsic relation between emotions, meta-learning and
universal action strategies suggests a central importance for emotional control
for the design of artificial intelligences and synthetic cognitive systems. An
implementation of this concept is proposed in terms of a dense and homogeneous
associative network (dHan).
