What if humans’ responses are merely probabilistically consistent with a history of sensory experiences? Would this change the significance of human emotions vs apparent emergent emotional responses from LLMs?
emotions regulate motivation, desire, action, behaviour etc.
to be angry is for your sensory-motor system to be primed for aggression; it's for your cognitive systems to be narrowed and focused on analysing high-threat parts of your environment; it is for your memory-formulation to be modulated towards threat recollection etc.
Sure, if an LLM's prompt "be angry" causes it to adopt a threat stance to its environment, to regulate it's theory-of-mind to engage with possible hostile entities, and so on --- then yes, when LLMs are there, I shall concede the point
However, how terrible it would be to start with an analysis of emotions in terms of the capacities of LLMs -- right?
Since if you did that you'd basically be hobbling your own ability to give an accurate account of emotions (etc.). And no doubt, far worse, end up thinking of yourself as a far narrower, less complex, less interesting, dumber thing than you really are.
Indeed, I wonder if we might consider there being something kinda intellectually offensive in this supposition. Here's my silly trinket, now, everything is just like that! End all science, we're done boys -- it's just P(Y|X)
Why should I discount a theory just to protect my ego? We've read countless stories about science only progressing when those with big egos die. It would only seem logical that eventually it will come for my own.
You're protecting your ego more when you compare people to LLMs, since that is your existing prejudice.
The sort of fashionable pseudo-scientific scientism in the belief that animals are alike digital electrical machines is a kind of egoism. It says, "the engineer of these machines (me!) knows all!"
The real hit to your ego is to suppose you are vastly more complex than you understand -- and this is why these engineers crop up and demand that there is nothing more to know than what they have already learned
this is an illusion of humility: these engineers take the implied nihilism of this view (that of the emptyness of animal life) as evidence that it is the humble one.
But, as ever nihilism, ends up being the most profound kind of arrogance, here its an ego-defence against the threat of their own ignorance.
And the threat is real: all you have ever learned about how to sequence transformations of natural numbers (all the algorithms of computer science) are of no use at all in the study of intelligence. What an injury to the ego!
to be angry is for your sensory-motor system to be primed for aggression; it's for your cognitive systems to be narrowed and focused on analysing high-threat parts of your environment; it is for your memory-formulation to be modulated towards threat recollection etc.
Sure, if an LLM's prompt "be angry" causes it to adopt a threat stance to its environment, to regulate it's theory-of-mind to engage with possible hostile entities, and so on --- then yes, when LLMs are there, I shall concede the point
However, how terrible it would be to start with an analysis of emotions in terms of the capacities of LLMs -- right?
Since if you did that you'd basically be hobbling your own ability to give an accurate account of emotions (etc.). And no doubt, far worse, end up thinking of yourself as a far narrower, less complex, less interesting, dumber thing than you really are.
Indeed, I wonder if we might consider there being something kinda intellectually offensive in this supposition. Here's my silly trinket, now, everything is just like that! End all science, we're done boys -- it's just P(Y|X)