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Comment by gAI | Hacker News Reader

Should we put "functional" in front of every other word to talk about AI? They have functional emotions, but they don't feel. They have functional goals, but not internally derived motives. They can be functionally rogue, but have no innate need to be free. Talking about AI that way seems cumbersome and not necessarily elucidating.

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What on earth are emotions, feelings and motives that are not functional? We created all those words to compactly describe the observed behavior of people and other animals, including ourselves. And now we’re applying them to machines. These are functional descriptions, always have been.

One of the more frustrating aspects of these sort of discussions are all the closet dualists out there. Lots of people clearly believe in an immaterial soul, even if they won't admit it. That and the tendency for meaningless semantic and often circular arguments.

I personally think about them through Patrick Dunn's information paradigm of magic(k), which leans on Charles Sanders Peirce's work. That would put modern AI closer to something like a dream character capable of surprising the dreamer, just running on a different substrate. I kinda doubt that's approachable enough to be useful in general discussion, though.

Disbelief that llms have qualia is not the same thing as believing that humans have them because they have an immaterial soul.

The vast majority of the "LLM have no qualia" discourse is mostly using it as a starting point to arguing that LLMs will never be able to X, however. This is a category error that makes no sense on its own--qualia or lack thereof doesn't affect capabilities, p-zombies etc--but that connection does make sense if the speaker is bringing in a hidden assumption of a dualistic human soul that imbues both qualia and additional capabilities to raw matter.

The word functional has been used in medicine to describe a condition symptomatically identical to another. Eg functional hypoglycemia is hypoglycemia symptoms without actual blood sugar drop.

There are two reasons it’s used

1) it’s easier to type (*)

2) Placate people who are strongly convinced it’s the same thing. To them “functional” means “nearly the same but not yet understood”. For others it’s just a way to sidestep the first group and have a conversation.

When I see a world like this consider the intended audience. When you and I talk, we drop the word because we both know we’re are talking about (*) “this system is exhibiting goal-seeking behavior similar to other systems that are understood to pursue goals”. If I don’t know the person I will use the word and focus on the subject.

Yes 100%. The language used currently maximizes the ability of those building these models to get off the hook. The anthropomorphizing we do of these things presents them as maximally capable and the companies as helpless to contain them. The way we talk about things impacts how we think about them.

I would rather use something like “semblance” or “appearance”. All these terms require an inner experience which we cannot observe in LLMs, we can just see their semblance, like a shadow of the traces of an inner experience some human has left in the data that trained these algorithms.

Can you observe inner experience of other people? If not, should we apply those terms when talking about anyone but ourselves?

You can’t, but you can make a reasonable guess that others like you will experience similar to you. We can even assume that (other) animals have inner experiences similar to us, since they are still biological organisms with a brain kind-of like ours. But an LLM is vastly different, so it makes sense to keep our assumptions in check and choose our words more carefully.

They do not have emotions, goals, or motivations, "functional" or otherwise. They are statistical models that appear as a magic trick to people who aren't familiar with the math.

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html

If something behaves as if it has a goal, that's a functional goal. When I say this chess engine is "trying to take my queen," I'm basically correct, insofar as this is a useful way to understand my computerized opponent. If I give it access to my queen, it'll capture it, because that's what it's trying to do.

If LLMs are "just" statistical models, humans are "just" a bunch of neurons squirting chemicals back and forth. There's no pixie dust in our brains that makes us special.

LLMs are not conscious: They have no analogues for feelings or senses and no construct of selfhood. But if a statistical model had those things—if it did all the mundane, physical bookkeeping our brains do to produce "real" emotions and motivations—then there's no reason it couldn't be as conscious as we are.

The really interesting thing about "AI" is it has shown how easily we are fooled, and how willing we are to be fooled.

There's some great research areas opened up by "AI". But it's research into people, not "AI". We should be looking into how human vision works, given that we take obviously generated images to be real. And how we grant intention to text which clearly has no intention.

Ok I agree they have functional goals and can functionally go rogue, but how do they functionally feel? They express feelings, but so do actors.

LLMs can't begin to have functional emotions unless they're (for instance) explicitly seeking out or avoiding situations based on the emotions those situations would produce in them. Has a chatbot ever responded to one of your requests with, "no, doing that would make me sad"?

As I understand it, acting is a good metaphor. These are some interesting reads.

Blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

Paper: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html

https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-selection-model

https://www.anthropic.com/research/assistant-axis

https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-vectors

Oh this is interesting. Thanks.

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