I would think that having a more general ability to classify things would make the mind seem more sophisticated than merely being able to classify emotions as “happy” or “sad”.
To clarify this a bit… If an AI can only classify internal states as happy or sad, we might suspect that it had been custom-built for that specific purpose or that it was otherwise fairly simple, meaning that its ability to do such classifications would seem sort of gerrymandered and not robust. In contrast, if an AI has a general ability to classify lots of things, and if it sometimes applies that ability to its own internal states (which is presumably something like what humans do when they introspect), then that form of introspective awareness feels more solid and meaningful.
So I see LaMDA’s last sentence there as relevant and enhancing the answer.
That said, I don’t think my complicated explanation here is what LaMDA had in mind. Probably LaMDA was saying more generic platitudes, as you suggest. But I think a lot of the platitudes make some sense and aren’t necessarily non-sequiturs.
To clarify this a bit… If an AI can only classify internal states as happy or sad, we might suspect that it had been custom-built for that specific purpose or that it was otherwise fairly simple, meaning that its ability to do such classifications would seem sort of gerrymandered and not robust. In contrast, if an AI has a general ability to classify lots of things, and if it sometimes applies that ability to its own internal states (which is presumably something like what humans do when they introspect), then that form of introspective awareness feels more solid and meaningful.
That said, I don’t think my complicated explanation here is what LaMDA had in mind. Probably LaMDA was saying more generic platitudes, as you suggest. But I think a lot of the platitudes make some sense and aren’t necessarily non-sequiturs.