> My understanding, and lived experience, has led me to an appreciation that emotion is a kind of psycho-somatic intelligence that steers both our body and cognition according to a broad set of circumstances.

Well, from what I understood, it is true that some parts of our brain are more dedicated to processing emotions and to integrating them with the "rational" part of the brain. However, the real source of emotions is biochemical, coming from the hormones of our body in response to environmental sollicitations. The LLM doesn't have that. It cannot feel the emotions to hug someone, or to be in love, or the parental urge to protect and care for children.

Without that, the LLM can just "verbalize" about emotions, as learned in the corpora of text from the training, but there are really no emotions, just things it learned and can express in a cold, abstract way.

For example, we recognize that a human can behave and verbalize to fake some emotions without actually having them. We just know how to behave and speak to express when we feel some specific emotion, but in our mind, we know we are faking the emotion. In the case of the LLM, it is physically incapable of having them, so all it can do is verbalize about them based on what it learned.