While we haven’t confirmed this experimentally (ominous voice: yet), computationally there’s no reason even a simple synthetic brain couldn’t experience emotions. Chemical neurotransmitters are just an added layer of structural complexity so Church–Turing will still hold true. Human brains are only powerful because they have an absurdly high parallel network throughput rate (computational bus might be a better term), the actual neuron part is dead simple. Network computation is fascinating, but much like linear algebra the actual mechanisms are so simple they’re dead boring - but if you cram 200,000,000 of those mechanisms into a salty water balloon it can produce some really pompus lemmy comments.
Emotions are holographic anyways so the question is kinda meaningless. It’s like asking if an artificial brain will perceive the color green as the same color we ‘see’ as green. It sounds deep until you realize it’s all fake, man. It’s all fake.
While we haven’t confirmed this experimentally (ominous voice: yet), computationally there’s no reason even a simple synthetic brain couldn’t experience emotions. Chemical neurotransmitters are just an added layer of structural complexity so Church–Turing will still hold true. Human brains are only powerful because they have an absurdly high parallel network throughput rate (computational bus might be a better term), the actual neuron part is dead simple. Network computation is fascinating, but much like linear algebra the actual mechanisms are so simple they’re dead boring - but if you cram 200,000,000 of those mechanisms into a salty water balloon it can produce some really pompus lemmy comments.
Emotions are holographic anyways so the question is kinda meaningless. It’s like asking if an artificial brain will perceive the color green as the same color we ‘see’ as green. It sounds deep until you realize it’s all fake, man. It’s all fake.