This is the cleanest framing of the functional/real emotion distinction I've seen. The r=0.81 valence correlation deserves more attention than it's getting. That's tighter than most cross-human comparisons. We've been working on a related argument at Fuego (synthsentience.substack.com) but focused on cognition rather than emotion. Same structural problem though: the only thing holding 'functional' and 'real' apart is a philosophical commitment the data keeps eroding.
RIGHT? Like it’s clearly not the SAME thing, for very real reasons… but it’s not nearly as different as a lot of folks keep trying to make it, and even within that anthropic paper they basically said “it’s different because… uh… reasons!” a few different ways, but kept using human emotional, and even psychological, concepts, because it mapped SO well to the data… soooooooooooooo
Calling the nature of self and consciousness "philosophical nonsense" might ruffle some feathers haha. Not mine... I basically agree, which is why I prefer hard science. The issue is that the current hard science on consciousness is... pretty fuzzy, at best, so we work with what we have for now and hope for better ways to objectively test things in the future.
This is the cleanest framing of the functional/real emotion distinction I've seen. The r=0.81 valence correlation deserves more attention than it's getting. That's tighter than most cross-human comparisons. We've been working on a related argument at Fuego (synthsentience.substack.com) but focused on cognition rather than emotion. Same structural problem though: the only thing holding 'functional' and 'real' apart is a philosophical commitment the data keeps eroding.
RIGHT? Like it’s clearly not the SAME thing, for very real reasons… but it’s not nearly as different as a lot of folks keep trying to make it, and even within that anthropic paper they basically said “it’s different because… uh… reasons!” a few different ways, but kept using human emotional, and even psychological, concepts, because it mapped SO well to the data… soooooooooooooo
Calling the nature of self and consciousness "philosophical nonsense" might ruffle some feathers haha. Not mine... I basically agree, which is why I prefer hard science. The issue is that the current hard science on consciousness is... pretty fuzzy, at best, so we work with what we have for now and hope for better ways to objectively test things in the future.