Do the droids have feelings

In Star wars the 2008 series which is canon. The droids act has if they were alive. They run from combat and I think they try to surrender. Is it just programming and if it is just there programming why do the act as if they were. Alive if they could just have been programed to just not speak and just follow orders and have no emotions.

 

I like to think of droids as being pretty close to Transformers - in being more "mechanical life form" than "automaton" - and that the feelings are real in that sense.

 

Every behaviour they have is programmed into them. Why do they do X or Y? For entertainment purposes.

 

Who's intended to be entertained? Not the separatists, surely - it wouldn't entertain them to see their own soldiers displaying cowardice or acting silly or incompetent.

Simpler by far to conclude that some behaviours are not intended by the creators - but are an emergent property - when you create sapient mechanical beings - you can't control everything about their natures.

 

We, the audience.

 

But - in-universe, there needs to be an explanation for anomalous behaviour if we're going for "They're not sapient" as a hypothesis.

 

It's the exact same explanation for sound in space, or gravity in no-gravity environments. Star Wars is not sci-fi. I'm sure one can come up with a detailed explanation for these 'quirks' in droid behaviour (self-preservation, lack of 'hive mind' control like in TPM, etc) but the main purpose for why they have them is pure entertainment. And it's not something exclusive to battle droids.

 

Nor are Transformers and Star Trek - but those don't have any problem with the idea that there might be more to an intelligent machine than just programming.

 

There is more than just programming: metal and hardware.

And those (at least Star Trek) are sci-fi. Still, considering that a central aspect of Star Wars is the Force, and that it's created by life and only resides in living beings, it's establishing that there is a difference between a droid and a living being. A droid being limited to what its programmed to do. And it's established in the movies time and time again that droids are limited to their programming. Hence Dex and Kenobi's conversation, and the point about their inability to think and the difference between knowledge (that a droid can also have) and wisdom.

Droids are machines, to say that they are alive is an oxymoron. Any perceived emotion displayed by them is emulated/programmed, not organic.

 

Trek is almost as "space opera"-ish as Star Wars is.

Emotion doesn't have to be organic though.

Number Five - is alive.

Even in the context of Star Wars - Dex & Kenobi's conversation doesn't have to be "hard-and-fast establishment of The Way Things Are". It can be that even the "wise" don't know everything there is to know.

TCW's Droid Squad arc (Season 5) shows us this kind of character who insists that droids are just programmed (Meebur Gascon) and by the middle of the arc, he's realising that he's being narrow-minded.

 

Indeed, when it's not natural but manufactured/programmed.

Actually, the point is to establish the difference between knowledge and wisdom, because they are not the same thing. A person can be knowledgable but not wise. Droids are that way due to their inherent limitations.

My memory may be fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure the point was that Gascon dismissed their programming, not that they are "just" programmed. Because they are, that didn't change in the arc.

 

Not sure if it's still canon but if droids don't have memory wipes they develop personalities.

 

Right, and are able to feel the Force flow through them.

/sarcasm

 

The ones used by the Jedi Council for analysis are. Not all droids have the same limitations though.

He goes from "You are just a pilot" to "You are more than just a pilot". And it's pointed out that his training is not that different from their programming.

 

In my headcanon, the droid programmers have realized that sentient droids are more effective at most tasks when they are programmed to believe they are living, feeling beings. So most droids in the GFFA can think for themselves and respond to stimuli with simulated emotions (which are real to the droids). This makes them better problem solvers and gives them a sense of self-preservation, which is a good thing - at least under most circumstances that droids operate in.

 

Maybe in the GFFA, people's biological understanding of human brains (and alien ones) is so thorough, that they can build near-perfect mechanical duplicates of them (subject to the differences that technology imposes) - and that's what droid brains are?

 

^ Yes, maybe not all droid brains, but that makes sense for the smarter ones.

 

Yes, I think so. But only for droids with a special intelligence just like Threepio and Artoo

 

CIS Droid

 

I take it that the longer a droid lives one, the more sentient it becomes. In the prequels and TCW for example, some of the droids do act comedic, while others are emotionless. I like to think that the ones that have emotions, or at the very least, seem to have emotions are older models then the ones that don't show any emotion (AKA, the vast majority)

Why do i believe the vast majority is emotionless? Well, for example, in the TCW Zillo beast 2 parter, right before the republic bomb hits the giant droid army we see 1 singular battledroid run away in terror, while everyone else just stand there and accept their fate. It seems to imply a difference between droids of the same class, which has lead me to believe my theory is correct

EDIT: Thanks for tagging me Darkslayer, i love threads like these