Truly felt emotions
Contents
[hide]A world without emotion experiencing agents remains "unobserved" (?)
- If it weren't for emotions then we would all be philosophical zombies and the world might as well not exist.
- Capability of experiencing emotions seems critically needed for what we usually mean with consciousness.
- If the world is not emotionally experienced can one even say it is observed then?
That is observed more than an unconscious transistor observes it's input to give an output.
AI and lack of truly felt emotions (so far)
AI as it is today (2025) most definitely has no emotions.
There's just a reward function in the batch training process but
that likely beares no resemlance of how feelings work in the human brain.
AI is exceptionally good at faking felt emotions, fooling many now and more in the future.
This is a problem in it's own right. To be discussed elsewhere.
Question of necessity of truyl felt emotions for living and problem solving.
Living like in surviving, and thriving in our by nature/god-if-you-prefer given environment, our planet and universe.
Repoducing, culture building, …
Experienced emotions are a thing that nature evolved out of necessity.
Will artificial intelligence eventually need to go a similar way to be able to make good and ethical decisions?
Or will at least part of highly intelligent AI remain forever emotionless (Start Trek Vulcans folk like).
(wiki-TODO: Good would be: Examples of emotions being a necessary part of understanding. And examples of were analyzing ones emotions consciously heps in solving problems.)
Will humanity eventually in it's far future only leave philosophical zombie AIs as descenents that …
- (a) do not truly experience feelings and that
- (b) reproducde by copying base minds and modifying from there
(no birth and painstakingly re-learning evryting from scratch evry time in various variety enriching ways equivalent)
Author suspects no to (a) and yes to (b).
Not judging positives negatives here.
If hman minds ever get copied over to "in silico" (aka mind uploading in SciFi, APM in Anime)
then that soul obviuosly support truly felt feelings.
Emulation of truely felt emotions (not simulation of fake emotions, as all of LLM-AI des as of 2025)
If artificial "in silico" circuits recreate the structures
in the human brain sufficciently well theny they should truly feel.
Many will probably disagree on this but to the author here
it seems there's nothing speaking against this.
There is the seemingly related question of
deterministic minds being constrained to uber astronomically smaller possibility spaces
but this is likely an orthogonal unrelated question to the capabilty of truly experiencing feelings/emotions.
Fundamentals
Are feelings really pimitive undecopodsabel experiences?
Or have we just not yet learned how to decompose and compose them.
Can there be experienced more than our three base colors RGB?
It should be possibe. Nothing special about the number three.
Can there be mor ebasic tastes than sweet, salty, sour, bitter, (and umami)?
What about the blank spots of the landscapesscape of smells & non-basic-smell-based-tastes?
The amount of emotion indicating emojis we have (and always finding new missing ones)
indicates that basic inner feelings of humans are quite rich and have variety.
How does that differ to various animals? Can insights be greaned from that in the other direction? Emulated trule felt emotions.
For one ting animals for the most part are incapable of shedding tears perfusely from intense emotions.
For an other the color experience is known to be very diffeent.
Dangers & Cosmic horror
- capability of tinkering with feelings ("drugs wihout substances")
- maximum of maximum horrifying eternal virtual hell (inentional or by accident)
- An awful curse of reality: Pain, fear, and many more negative feelings (unknown limit of intenisty uncomfortable) can't be understood without them being experienced.
- If conscious experience never ends (consciousness as time scaling frame rate) then "we" all have arbitray long arbitary intense feelings "ahead" of us both the unspeakably good and the unspeakably bad. Yay.
