Thank you very much for the criticism. Jeremias: I genuinely appreciate it. Please allow me to provide some context before commenting. Professor W.J. Wukmir developed the orectic theory, which I used in this post to provide a theory of emotions. The man in question lived in Barcelona, where he arrived around 1960 and was stateless until his death in 1981. Unfortunately, his theories have been lost to the course of time. A few months ago, the last of his disciples passed away. I'm afraid his theory will be forgotten in some second-hand bookstore as a rarity. His disciples said that in his youth (in the early 1930s), Wukmir had intense disputes with Freud and Adler in the Vienna circle to which the three belonged. Freud saw him as a revolutionary, while Wukmir believed that Freud was unable to understand him. I apologize for writing this preview, but my purpose was only to offer light on the origins of this theory.

The critique raises some important issues that should be carefully considered. However, I believe there are some fundamental misunderstandings concerning the nature and purpose of emotions as described by Wukmir's orectic theory, which I will address. I apologize for not being more clear in explaining them. 
Emotions, according to this theory, are not just "shortcut heuristics" but also essential systems of vital orientation. Emotions are more than just quick evaluations in the absence of detail; they are complex, multidimensional evaluations that incorporate multiple aspects of an organism's internal state, external environment, and previous experiences. This valuation process takes place at all levels of an organism, from individual cells to complex brain systems. The goal here is to emphasize the relevance of the "valuation" process rather than focusing solely on the emotions involved. 

Your critique implies a distinction between emotion and cognition, which my argument explicitly rejects. According to the orectic theory, emotion and cognition are inextricably related parts of the same process of vital orientation. Every cognitive act entails emotional valuation, and every emotional response contains cognitive components. This integration is not a "ghost in the machine," but rather an essential component of how living systems process information and make decisions. This is what we require from AI: process information and make decisions.

Your claim that AI can make decisions without emotions ignores the importance of emotions in decision-making, according to orectic theory. It's probably my fault for not explaining it more concisely. Emotions are not an add-on to decision-making; they are essential to the process of analyzing possibilities and deciding courses of action. According to this viewpoint, assigning meaning and value to stimuli and prospective actions is an emotional process.

The notion that ethics can be "arbitrarily programmed" without emotional capacity misses the importance of emotions in moral judgment. In my opinion, ethical decisions are fundamentally dependent on emotional valuations of situations and the resulting outcomes. A strictly logical system of ethics without emotional components would lack the critical ability to attach meaning and value to different outcomes.
Your argument appears to presuppose a restricted definition of intelligence that focuses on information processing and decision-making in a mechanical sense. The theory I described, as well as many modern perspectives in cognitive research, advocate for a more embodied and embedded conception of intelligence that must include emotional processes. From this standpoint, a "fully functioning artificial intelligence" would have to have emotion-like mechanisms.

While it is true that more precise prompts may elicit different answers, the purpose of the GPT-4o example was to demonstrate the limitations of simply language-based AI in grasping emotional context. Human communication is highly reliant on emotional understanding that extends beyond the literal meaning of words, and this understanding is rooted in shared embodied experiences.
 

Finally, the notion that language can completely compensate for the lack of nonverbal emotional cues overlooks the embodied character of emotional cognition. In my opinion, our emotional knowledge is largely based on our bodily experiences and cannot be completely reduced to linguistic descriptions.

While semantic and emotional information flows start in parallel, they are not fully parallel throughout the entire process. They update each other iteratively, enabling it to capture intricate connections between semantic content and emotional tone. This has the potential to enhance the model's comprehension of the input text, resulting in a more refined understanding.

Hi Milan,

concerning the fist question, I'm using only three dimension to simplify the annotation process. This space could have more dimensions, offering a more rich description at emotional level. 

Concerning the second question, in the examples the emotional values were shown at the token (word) level. However, this is a simplified representation of a more complex process. While individual tokens have their own emotional embeddings, these are not used in isolation. The model integrates these token-level embeddings with their context. This integration happens through the attention mechanism, which considers the relationships between all tokens in a sequence.

The overall emotional evaluation of a sentence arises from the interaction of its individual tokens through the attention mechanism. This enables the model to capture subtle emotional variations that result from the combining of words, which may deviate from a simple aggregation of individual word emotions. The λ parameter in our attention mechanism allows the model to adaptively weight the importance of emotional information relative to semantic content.