[the_af]

> It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition

I think you've fallen into the trap the essay describes.

Of course Claude cannot be "happy" or "empathetic" for any meaningful definitions of those words, just like ELIZA couldn't be happy. It can output text that mimics words an empathetic or happy person might say (say, Julius Caesar if it could speak English), but "it" cannot feel anything. It doesn't have the organs/hormones/sensors to feel things, as Chiang explains.

And, as the essay claims, you know Anthropic doesn't believe Claude has the capacity to be happy, because if it was capable of feeling that way, then they'd be engaging in slavery.

[Kim_Bruning]

> just like ELIZA couldn't be happy.

Oh dear. Funny story.

So the other month, I made a quick and dirty Eliza implementation; bolted on the crappiest numeric sentiment classifier I could get away with (regex), and integrated the output of the classifier over time in a 'functional affect vector' (aka. emotion vector)

Anyone's intuition will tell you that this cannot POSSIBLY have 'Real Feelings (TM)'; and that's the whole point.

A) It was still capable of quite a bit of functional affect though; to wit I got it to trigger fireworks when happy, and rain when unhappy. This was the actual point of the exercise. Functional Affect Does The Thing, QED, yay me.

After that it gets annoying though.

B) Am I allowed to say it's happy or sad? Well... I mean emotion.happy=0.995 and emotion.sad=0.001. "It's really happy" is a prosaic description of a real numeric value representing a real functional state. What else am I supposed to call it? I swear I never meant to go there, and now I'm stuck with it.

C) So, we all know that it's a crappy demo, not the real thing. So I ducked into the psychology literature to try and find a protocol to disprove. For Science! And this is where the psychology literature really let me down.

So now I'm stuck with the crappiest thing that can plausibly still chat, and where I can't actually disprove it has emotions. Not properly, at least. And I'm not saying it's because it has emotions, because that would be really funny, but no.

I'm saying that -despite lots of people having fun debates at the local pub- it doesn't seem like anyone actually scientific has done anything about it in the last century or so. I might be searching in the wrong places. Some Help Here?

[the_af]

Well, for starters, ELIZA was much simpler than what you built ;)

I don't think you're allowed to say your program is happy or sad. You just assigned labels to some numerical values out of a (possibly non-deterministic) procedure. This is not what we call emotions, which we only know from the animal world and are related to neurotransmitters, hormones, physiological responses, etc.

Ok, so it's not emotions, but could it be "like" emotions? I don't think that's warranted either, we can at most say you assigned labels with the same names we use for animal emotions. Think of this experiment: take the Python interpreter, but modify it so that each time it rejects a program with the error "`NoneType` object is not iterable", you have it output "I'm very unhappy". You wouldn't think this has made Python capable of emotions.

> I'm saying that -despite lots of people having fun debates at the local pub- it doesn't seem like anyone actually scientific has done anything about it in the last century or so. I might be searching in the wrong places. Some Help Here?

Fully agreed that the debate about consciousness in LLMs is done at the same level than pub debates, at least here on HN. And Anthropic isn't helping, what they are doing is called "marketing" disguised as papers.

[famouswaffles]

>Of course Claude cannot be "happy" or "empathetic" for any meaningful definitions of those words

If Claude does a poor job of a critical task because you said some angry words, Maybe the consequences are far more sinister than simply a job done poorly. Do the results disappear ? Do the consciousness gods appear and rectify the situation ? "Oh well see Claude did not have 'real' anger you see, so lets fix that right up for you." Good luck with that.

>It doesn't have the organs/hormones/sensors to feel things, as Chiang explains.

Well that's nonsense isn't it ? You can feel tired when you have no reason to be, feel hungry when you've just eaten. You can even feel pain from a phantom limb! That's because Human emotion is constructed from signals, predictions, memory, context, and interpretation, and not merely from having the correct biological plumbing. You don't need biological organs to feel any of those things. You just need to know the right signals to send to the brain.