So should I go pursue a degree in psychology and become a datacenter on-call therapist?
Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
11–20 of 212 posts
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#12There was a really old project from mit called conceptnet that I worked with many years ago. It was basically a graph of concepts (not exactly but close enough) and emotions came into it too just as part of the concepts. For example a cake concept is close to a birthday concept is close to a happy feeling.
What was funny though is that it was trained by MIT students so you had the concept of getting a good grade on a test as a happier concept than kissing a girl for the first time.
Another problem is emotions are cultural. For example, emotions tied to dogs are different in different cultures.
We wanted to create concept nets for individuals - that is basically your personality and knowledge combined but the amount of data required was just too much. You'd have to record all interactions for a person to feed the system.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#13> Note that none of this tells us whether language models actually feel anything or have subjective experiences. You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.
> That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.
The Chinese Room would like a word.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#14A-HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHJ
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#15The technology they are discovering is called "Language". It was designed to encode emotions by a sender and invoke emotions in the reader. The emotions a reader gets from LLM are still coming from the language
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#16> Note that none of this tells us whether language models actually feel anything or have subjective experiences. You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.
> That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing. The Chinese Room would like a word.
The Chinese room is nonsense though. How did it get every conceivable reply to every conceivable question? Presumably because people thought of and answered everything conceivable. Meaning that you’re actually talking to a Chinese room plus multiple people composite system. You would not argue that the human part of that system isn’t conscious.
But this distraction aside, my point is this: there is only mechanism. If someone’s demand to accept consciousness in some other entity is to experience those experiences for themselves, then that’s a nonsensical demand. You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#17[flagged]
Probably the other direction. Emotions are raw, most humans relate and change behavior accordingly.
Only psychopaths think of emotion as nothing but a means to changing behavior. The scary thing is that LLMs by nature would exhibit the same behavior.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#18[dead]
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing. The Chinese Room would like a word.
The Chinese room is nonsense though. How did it get every conceivable reply to every conceivable question? Presumably because people thought of and answered everything conceivable. Meaning that you’re actually talking to a Chinese room plus multiple people composite system. You would not argue that the human part of that system isn’t conscious. But this distraction aside, my point is this: there is only mechanism. If…
> You would not argue that the human part of that system isn’t conscious.
Sure I would. The human part is not being inferenced, the data is. LLM output in this circumstance is no more conscious than a book that you read by flipping to random pages.
> You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.
I don't assume anything about everyone or everything's intelligence. I have a healthy distrust of all claims.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#20The technology they are discovering is called "Language". It was designed to encode emotions by a sender and invoke emotions in the reader. The emotions a reader gets from LLM are still coming from the language
Emotional signals are more than just text though, there is a reason tone and body language is so important for understanding what someone says. Sarcasm and so on doesn't work well without it.