How can one support the theory of people having feelings, except for assuming that people feel more or less what you feel yourself? Unless you can experience others' feelings yourself somehow, you can always call everyone else's behavior "responses to repeated stimuli in a way that generates a more advantageous outcome." Personality is no different (so different fish, or people, have a different strategy of generating advantageous outcomes - learned or innate, it indicates some degree of complexity, but not "feelings.")
The whole subject of "feelings" is kinda thorny as long as you either subscribe to a worldview where there's no real difference between inanimate and living objects (it's all just a bunch of atoms, it just so happens that some bunches move and some are stationary), or, alternatively, if you do believe in such a difference but have nothing but a gut feeling to rely on when defining the limit between "machines" and "feeling beings." Which means it's a thorny issue for, well, most of us.
At one end of the spectrum we have single celled organisms that respond to stimuli in specific, preprogrammed ways. At the other end of the spectrum (as far as we know), we have humans, with conscious thought, memory and feelings that guide us to our responses. I think of feelings as just another, albeit more advanced and nuanced, feedback system in the larger system that guides us. I think certain actions are easier to achieve with more complex systems (such as those that include rational thought and or emotions). For example, self sacrifice, working for a group goal, or prioritizing your offspring over yourself. It's possible instinct might work in some of these cases, but I'm also not sure how instinct differs from emotion in some cases.
So, what I meant was that I'm not sure response to feeding, or imminent feeding necessarily shows of any of the mechanisms I would associate emotions, in my naive understanding of the subject, purely on the basis that I think a similar response could be achieved without emotions. I thin human behavior is complex enough that emotions are evident in most cases, even on short observation. For example, viewing feeding in humans with more than a few individuals would probably show common groupings between the humans after just a short while. While it's possible that this could be the result of extremely complex or finely tuned automata, it's more likely in my eyes that there are more complex feedback mechanisms in place (which to be fair, could easily be classified under "extremely complex automata").
In short, I don't place a huge importance on emotions, as I think they are just an extra mechanism that develops in complex feedback systems for a more advantageous set of responses to stimuli. That said, I think we can look at how organisms respond to stimuli and make educated guesses as to whether emotions are in play or not, and to what degree. I also don't believe there's any real distinction between a machine and a human being. We've just developed feedback mechanisms so complex that they've generated new emergent behavior.
It's not without its merits, but the question then remains whether emacs suffers when closed if it accumulated enough state for Steve Yegge to consider it "conscious" the way humans are.
The whole subject of "feelings" is kinda thorny as long as you either subscribe to a worldview where there's no real difference between inanimate and living objects (it's all just a bunch of atoms, it just so happens that some bunches move and some are stationary), or, alternatively, if you do believe in such a difference but have nothing but a gut feeling to rely on when defining the limit between "machines" and "feeling beings." Which means it's a thorny issue for, well, most of us.