If an artificially intelligent robot was built, and it has emotion, are those emotions valid?

Whenever the question "if" is asked, followed by something impossible, then it is not possible to give any answer.

When will this crushingly obvious fact be realised?

For an illustration :

If you didn't exist what sort of answer would you give to this question?

Get it?

Edit : Obviously you don't get it.

Emotions are simply E - motion. It is the thing in our brain that triggers motion (or inaction) Or to put it a further method, feelings are simply primal common sense. As i admire to position it, the heart desires, the mind acquires. Intelligence is how well you solve the undertaking at hand. Emotions are how you make a decision which project to do. However in an extraordinarily actual feel, identifying what to do IS the assignment at hand of existence. There are a lot of robots which can be quite excellent at performing the undertaking at hand. But they have got no say in picking out that assignment. For this reason we regard them as emotionless. So for those who manipulate to create a robotic that chooses what it'll do .... Then by using definition you've given it emotions. I.E. Some evaluation have got to compel the robot to take action - that analysis is an emotion. Superstar Trek's data persona - so much to it's protests otherwise is profoundly emotional. The want to be more 'human' would represent an emotion. The want to avoid it's own destruction would additionally qualify.

Catholic

Well... ish

First off, emotions are just feelings. Anything with a soul (which you should understand as "mind") and with senses can feel. So, when you ask, "Are the emotions valid," you mean, "Is it ever possible for the sensory input for a robot to cross the line between 'data' and 'emotion.'" Which, since a soul is the significant difference between the two, is the question, "Can robots have souls?"

To which I answer, yes. Artificial life is still life. Now, it would be a very complicated task -- man creating life through machine -- but possible. It might create a theological stir at first, since all souls are created by God, and it would seem, here, man would be making the soul. But, really, man is just providing the intermediary step between God and the machine. In much the same way, a child's soul comes from God, even though the body and brain comes from the mother and the instinctive knowledge comes from the genes of the parents. We would be creating the body, God would be creating the soul. We would just be making the perfect conduit for the soul to enter.

But there are a great many practical issues with this, namely that the line between "really smart machine" and "living robot" is impossible for the human eye to see. We may be able to tell once we're clearly over, but, before then...

EDIT:

As well, there is great difficulty in answering this question because the nature of the soul is not fully understood. We can identify a great many things as having souls (people, animals), but, like I said before, it may be impossible for us to distinguish between a really well-programmed, Turing-complete machine and a living artificial being. ANd I maintain it is theoretically possible to have a machine soul, even if we never develop the ability to make one.

No religion. Several movies and books have explored this subject. I liked Short Circuit, because in the end he is granted full citizenship and all rights humans enjoy. No disassemble! he would cry. Space Odyssey 2001 had HAL, who turned malevolent and had to be shut down. Most religious people would say that all life comes from god but if we ever get Artificial Intelligence, we would have to reexamine that view, because if it is indeed intelligent, it will have feelings. It may not be able to feel pain as we know it, but it might feel lonely, for example.

Artificial Intelligence is a long way off for the simple reason that although computers can do thousands of calculations a second, they have no common sense. A simple computer program that translates, say, English into Russian, might translate "time flies like an arrow" into "clock insects enjoy a weapon."

"Non-religious people will say the emotions are no more invalid than human emotion as they are caused by chemical reactions within your body and if a robot's design can imitate this then it has valid emotion."

That's not necessarily true, just a generalization. I'm not religious, and I would say that an android/machine can only have artificial emotions as an imitation of a human beings, such as you might see the droids have in star wars. It may seem real but its just a program.

Well that depends on whether or not the AI actually *feels* that emotion, or is merely programmed to mimic all the signs of having an emotion.

Which of course leads to the question, is it possible to create an AI that feels real emotion? I don't have an answer to that, but I suspect it would be "yes". I see the mind/soul as something that arises out of sufficiently sophisticated information processing capability. Emotions might well become possible as we get there. Currently cutting-edge computers have about as much processing power as a mouse's brain. By around the mid 2020s, it is projected that computers will have as much processing power as the human brain.

Well, I think that all depends on a lot of different things. Like what its range of emotions is, how rational its emotions are in different situations, etc. If you were to assume, for the sake of hypothesis, that it felt the same range of emotions as humans and felt them just as rationally as we do, I'd say yes, they're valid. After all, what are humans but biological machines, and what are our emotions but tiny electric sparks through neurons?

No, because they're not God-given emotions.

Humans cannot give souls to inanimate objects.

You have to understand how that would work firstly. The robot wouldn't actually feel emotions, it would just respond to certain stimuli in the way that it was programmed to. It wouldn't really be "emotions".

if the intelligence is artificial then wouldn't the emotions be artificially generated?