alt Hacker NewsEmotions 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.
Replies
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.
> 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?
>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?")