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>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?")

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True, but in this context it's worth reminding that LLMs work exclusively from the word descriptions, not having access to the raw sensations.

Everything they learn about emotions is the statistical patterns of how humans react to situations based on their human feelings. There's no direct knowledge from having those feelings themselves.

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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.
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People like to call LLMs 'stochastical parrots' but I see them as the ultimate 'philosophical zombie'.

They are becoming more and more capable of imitating every single nuance of human behaviour yet they lack the neural pathways to connect those thoughts and behaviours with feelings and self-perception; it's blind imitation all the way down.

The process by which a model seems to generate discourse about deep philosophical questions is, in self-aware terms, equivalent to the knee-jerk reflex or the beating of the heart.

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Echopraxia, or a variation of.
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Are chemicals signals, or magic emotion juice.
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Depends on how they are responded to, if you’re looking for a flippant answer to a flippant question.
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> 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?

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Nature v. Nuture. Age long debate, not to be solved here... but an interesting fact about this I heard in a huberman podcast. There are regions in you brain that will only get activated at a certain age (different in men and women) that will impact behavior or reactions to different stimuli. So as much as we think we are in control of our destiny, more is written into our genes than we might want or appreciate.
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That is such a derail, sorry. I was not trying to debate that, I do not want to debate that, I think you missed the point entirely.

Biological determinism doesn't matter at all for what is important here:

1. our internal cues don't correspond neatly to our words for emotions

2. it may be possible to interpret the same sensation as very different emotions depending on context

3. It may even be possible to mis-interpret our emotional sensations, or at the very least interpret them in self-destructive ways.

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