Comment by Timwi

The real challenge is not to see it as a binary (the machine either has feelings or it has none). It's possible for the machine to have emergent processes or properties that resemble human feelings in their function and their complexity, but are otherwise nothing like them (structured very differently and work on completely different principles). It's possible to have a machine or algorithm so complex that the question of whether it has feelings is just a semantic debate on what you mean by “feelings” and where you draw the line.

A lot of the people who say “machines will never have feelings” are confident in that statement because they draw the line incredibly narrowly: if it ain't human, it ain't feeling. This seems to me putting the cart before the horse. It ain't feeling because you defined it so.