[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.