upvote
> The post starts by saying that discussing whether they have subjective emotion is a waste of time

"Empathy and understanding for the human condition" is not an emotion. As the post I responded to said, it's an objective thing, not subjective.

reply
The post speaks of "subjective experience of reality", not "subjective emotion". Both the emotions and the non-emotions listed would fall under that category.
reply
"It's important that Claude is happy" is an emotion. But it's begging the question that Claude can be happy at all.

If it's pointless to consider whether Claude has subjective emptions, then it's pointless to state that Claude must be happy.

If we want to be precise (and honest) we could say "it's important that as a tool people interact with, Claude acts as a happy and helpful assistant, and does not produce offensive or unhelpful text output".

But see? This is the con Chiang is protesting against: Anthropic encourages us to perceive Claude as if it was a sentient being.

reply