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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Is this not how children learn emotions from their parents? Pattern matching from all the absorbed snippets.

I'd be interested to see how well an AI, trained only on the outputs of an individual, would be able to mimic that individual. Getting into Black Mirror territory. Would need a decent corpus of learning material which, personally, I'd be loathe to spend the time and effort creating because I respect my own privacy.... which then leads to the only human-clone AIs will be of those people who have enough ego / arrogance to want to catalogue their own lives, which could put a decent percentage of the rest of the world off the idea, if these are the examples.

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Emotions aren't all learned, a lot of it comes wired in us because that's how we relate to others as a species and as animals, in general.

Being angry, being happy, being sad, these are not things we learn. What we learn is how to control the emotions and when it is appropriate to express them.

There's mental disorders of people that don't feel emotions like normal people do, they don't get angry, happy or sad. So what we've learned about these people is that they can mimic the emotions by knowing when it is appropriate and expected to express them. But they don't feel them.

I think the LLMs are closer to psychopaths than to normal children learning the contextual expectations around their emotional responses.

Hah! That's a lot scarier, and seems more plausible in that they lack the chemistry that seems to be the basis of emotions. Also much more fertile ground from which to grow techno-horror stories.

Are chemicals signals, or magic emotion juice.

Depends on how they are responded to, if you’re looking for a flippant answer to a flippant question.

People like to call LLMs 'stochastical parrots' but I see them as the ultimate 'philosophical zombie'.

They are becoming more and more capable of imitating every single nuance of human behaviour yet they lack the neural pathways to connect those thoughts and behaviours with feelings and self-perception; it's blind imitation all the way down.

The process by which a model seems to generate discourse about deep philosophical questions is, in self-aware terms, equivalent to the knee-jerk reflex or the beating of the heart.

Echopraxia, or a variation of.

> Being angry, being happy, being sad, these are not things we learn.

True, but only sort of. You'll have the sensations, but you have to learn to name them of course, and there's more interpretation going on than you might think.

There's a classic psychology study where they gave people niacin and asked them to rate their emotional response to a video. Niacin gives people a flush. Regardless of whether the video was of something that would make you angry or sentimental etc. the people who got niacin reported having a much stronger emotional response - they interpreted the physical cue from the drug as part of their own emotions.

You could do some pretty unethical things with that, it occurs to me. Maybe that was what L. Ron Hubbard was trying with his niacin-based drug addiction therapy.

Even darker, I've read plenty of accounts of people who grew up with abuse who seem to seek out abusive relationships. Sometimes they can even be shockingly upfront about doing so. What if they literally haven't learned the difference between internal cues of arousal from affection and arousal from fear?

Nature v. Nuture. Age long debate, not to be solved here... but an interesting fact about this I heard in a huberman podcast. There are regions in you brain that will only get activated at a certain age (different in men and women) that will impact behavior or reactions to different stimuli. So as much as we think we are in control of our destiny, more is written into our genes than we might want or appreciate.

That is such a derail, sorry. I was not trying to debate that, I do not want to debate that, I think you missed the point entirely.

Biological determinism doesn't matter at all for what is important here:

1. our internal cues don't correspond neatly to our words for emotions

2. it may be possible to interpret the same sensation as very different emotions depending on context

3. It may even be possible to mis-interpret our emotional sensations, or at the very least interpret them in self-destructive ways.

>Emotions aren't all learned, a lot of it comes wired in us because that's how we relate to others as a species and as animals, in general.

Yes and no. My understanding is that modern neuroscience is trying to disentangle the raw sensations and contexts from the words we put to them (emotions), kinda like how colors are just wavelengths but we call them different things (like "is my green your green?")

True, but in this context it's worth reminding that LLMs work exclusively from the word descriptions, not having access to the raw sensations.

Everything they learn about emotions is the statistical patterns of how humans react to situations based on their human feelings. There's no direct knowledge from having those feelings themselves.

You have unintentionally created my next start-up idea.

Bio inference.

Let your Agents feel what you feel!

Kids have emotions regardless of their parents. Kid learn emotional handling from parents.

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