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it's status as a machine, could it go beyond it's programming to feel empathy, pain, emotion, and then swing it eight to the bar?



It's funny, you're use of "it" to refer to Data reminds me of one of the very best episodes ever where a researcher wanted to take Data back to his lab to disassemble "it" for study and it wound up in court to determine if Data was a legal person or simply an "it". Riker was the prosecutor and Picard the defense and that whole ep was just great. At the end Data turns to the researcher and says the court just gave him the right to choose if he wants to go to the lab and be disassembled. He said "I choose not but I am willing to help you in any other way I can". It was a remake of one of Heinlein's classic books about a genetically engineered monkey with human level intelligence and did the monkey have human rights or not.
The deal about a machine having emotions is very interesting. I personally think not but the appearance of feelings can be synthisized so well that it would fool almost anybody interacting with it, sort of like that experiment years ago where a researcher put in a whole series of questions and answers into a computer and had real people interact with it and then judge if they were dealing with a real person or not. Most thought it was a real person.

Bob

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