This is going to be a little long, but bear with me:
At the heart of this, you’re kind of posing the “Chinese Room” thought experiment. The Chinese Room thought experiment supposes that there is a machine programmed to perfectly mimic proper responses in Chinese. That is, input Chinese question, output correct Chinese answer. Then, suppose that machine is sophisticated enough to convince a Chinese-speaking human A that they are speaking with another human speaking Chinese (in essence, it passes the Turing test). Does the machine truly understand Chinese?
Suppose, instead, that there’s human B inside of a room. B can’t speak Chinese at all, but is equipped w/a work flow that would produce proper Chinese responses to A’s questions (regardless of what A asks B); however, provides B with no understanding of what was actually asked or answered. B then performs the same function as the machine by taking his input and outputting through a slot in the door of the room. Assuming B has infinite resources, using the workflow, B then convinces A that he is speaking to something that is capable of speaking Chinese. Does B really speak and understand Chinese?
The thought experiment argues that those two situations are exactly the same. Without understanding, there can be no genuine intelligence. The machine doesn’t understand Chinese any better than B does. It is merely mimicking an understanding of Chinese.
Assuming that I’ve explained/understood the Chinese Room thought experiment properly, what does this have to do with the question at hand? I would argue that if the Cylons were directly programmed to love, then Helo’s statement would be accurate (Cylons feel nothing but what their software tells them to). The Cylons would merely be taking input (behaviors/words/etc. from humans) and outputting the proper response: love/affection/etc. You can kind of see where I’m going with this.
I assert that the Cylons are capable of feeling love. They were not originally programmed to feel love. Essentially, the emotion of love is, probably, outside of their original programming. It is a completely foreign concept to them. Thus, any revelations they’ve made regarding love would be the result of their own reasoning/logic. Thus, they would have an actual understanding of what the concept of “love” entails. Essentially, they learned how to love on their own.
Or maybe it’s late and I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.
