Some of these feelings are very intellectual and abstract, and I think they have very little to do with having a body.
I’ve seen good arguments that they have a lot to do with the body. There are tons of neurons outside the brain feeding it data and stimuli, often subconsciously, and tons of hormones being transferred around the body. Our digestive system can control how we feel about things before the brain even logically processes them (gut-feeling, not just digestive related stuff). If the toddler didn’t associate the cookie with something that made him feel good, would he have cared? Is there even a good “feeling” without the rest of the body? Perhaps LLMs could implicitly learn to imitate systems like this without explicitly being trained to, IDK.
I’ve seen good arguments that they have a lot to do with the body. There are tons of neurons outside the brain feeding it data and stimuli, often subconsciously, and tons of hormones being transferred around the body. Our digestive system can control how we feel about things before the brain even logically processes them (gut-feeling, not just digestive related stuff). If the toddler didn’t associate the cookie with something that made him feel good, would he have cared? Is there even a good “feeling” without the rest of the body? Perhaps LLMs could implicitly learn to imitate systems like this without explicitly being trained to, IDK.