Functional Emotion Without Character: Large Language Models, Aristotelian Disposition, and the Limits of Behavioral Alignment

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.22362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Debates about whether artificial systems can feel are often forced between two unsatisfactory positions: behavioral equivalence is treated as sufficient for emotion, or phenomenal consciousness is treated as a prerequisite that makes the question empirically inaccessible. This article develops a structural alternative. It models emotions as context-sensitive regions, trajectories and attractor dynamics in high-dimensional representational state spa