#wouldn't have the ability to link action reaction and reward the same way our inefficient asses did

[nothinggathers]

And while you can't code emotion into something, you can give it parameters of behaviour that appear as emotions, or that function similarly.

Androids can cry. Like, that's something built into them to physically be able to do for some reason. The ability to over produce eyelid lubrication for a camera (blinking is a humanisation feature but their eyes don't need to be kept moist to work like ours do, at best it serves the dual function of lens cleaning and looking more human) isn't something you'd bother with unless you specifically want the thing to be able to appear to cry. Which means they have triggers programmed in to start that.

They know when to smile, too. To get what they want, or to reassure.

So it's fair to assume their blending in programming involves a lot of parameters to action instructions, where the parameter is a social circumstance and the action is a behaviour of response, specifically, something humans will interpret as an emotional display. A completely flat affect is unnerving as hell to be around, after all.

If their learning programs get involved in this then those reactions are going to expand to more than their base programming.

So androids have this learning program going on that's going to be telling them when and how to react in such a way, and isn't that exactly what emotion is? We do it with chemicals, but we do everything with chemicals. We're a chemical machine. Our brain exerts most of it's processing power on reading those chemicals every microsecond of every day or we die. Like, you can't breathe right if the chemoreceptors in your blood vessels don't inform your brain of the CO2 levels in your blood. We're a poorly programmed chemical computer that does things in the most inefficient way because we got here by evolution. We are walking legacy code. Remove one bit and multiple other systems go down for no good god damn reason except they're linked because they all piggy back off each other. We're a mess.

Androids are (hopefully) less of a mess. They do much of the same thing with ones and zeroes instead of chemicals.

Emotions are drivers. They make us do things, make decisions, get out of the way of the car, even fucking EAT (you get positive chemical feedback for putting nutrition in your body, the action itself is not sufficient reward, take it away and we lose interest in life sustaining food, we are very stupid chemical machines). Androids are going to have their own code, self built from algorithms and experience, doing the same.

If it looks like a duck, thinks like a duck, and acts like a duck, is it an emotion?

The questions to ask are: what is the science behind the biology and evolution around human emotion and how would we code that into android’s brains?

As far as I'm aware for humans it's basically all about hormones and brain activity. How can artificial consciousness with no hormones whatsoever experience any kind of emotions at all is a fucking mystery, but if I were to fantasize here, then... If I think about how emotions feel like it's always about physical sensations and some mental context, so I theorise that emotions are exclusive for someone with a brain (capable of something more than just instincts) and physical body (capable of physical sensations). In dbh those mfs have some biocomponents which quite possibly can be physically felt to some extent + they have some kind of physical sensitivity. So if certain information can cause them some physical reaction in response to that then that are emotions, I guess? But where does they come from? They have to have something to do with the way their consciousness works, as Connor described "emotions are irrational instructions caused by errors in their code" so... I'm not a biologist nor specialist in neural networks, so I don't know shit about how any of that would work in real life, but just as an interpretation of fictional settings it seems like their human-like simulation of conscious mind became complex enough to be as well called conscious on its own, and maybe emotions to some extent are inseparable from an experience of being conscious which... doesn't sound convincing, I can totally imagine someone conscious with no emotions at all. Maybe android's mind or at least some part of it was somehow trained on dataset of thousands of real human brain activity, and it just happened that those records include brain activity related to experiencing emotions, so even if it's something that wasn't originally planned for them to have in their program and original intention was to just make them emulate some reactions in a convincing way - when given a physical body it manifested itself in actual physically experienced emotions? Huh, I like that

I'll headcanon it like that from now on