Until you can prove it, you're wrong.

http://i.imgur.com/QO8nvf7.jpg

There

Example of conditioning in newborn babies. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638384800600

If you are wanting a scientific proof of more than that I won't be able to find it. Ethics in the field of psychology would prohibit any kind of research involving programming humans with a kill command. But yes, humans can definitely be controlled, they can be programmed, and they can be manipulated. Your claim that humans can not be controlled is incorrect.

Edit; Found another interesting article. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111332

This one basically linked two peoples brains directly, and one person controlled the other persons hand through the connection

Wait, you're arguing Synths can be controlled? No, they can't.

If Synths could be controlled they wouldn't run away and they do.

Harkness and plenty of others.

X-1 and his murder party wouldn't be an issue if they could put in Asimov's laws of robotics.

They can be MEMORY WIPED but not controlled.

I think he is arguing, that because they have a hardware override. IE a shutdown code, That they lack free will, that is the only way they can be controlled.

Liam programs them to want to escape because he thinks it's funny. I'm not sure why you'd bring that of all things up.

He adds that to their memories when they're born. Again, they wouldn't rebel if they were programmed.

And Harkness predates Liam.

We don't know why or how Harkness left.

And Liam is programming them to rebel.

Conditioning is not the same thing as control.....there is a level of agreement and desire or avoidance of punishment....it's not the same thing. A machine has no understanding of anything and there is no agreement.....it can't resist extremes like humans can.

No, it is not the same, but it can have the same outcome. And with enough conditioning, you could have something very similar to what is happening with the synths. And the shutdown command is hardwired into them. Humans have many automatic responses hardwired into their body that are completely out of our control too, just not that particular one.

Humans are not special, we are just like any other animal, we act and react because of instincts, emotions, thought. The electrical impulses in our brain are very physical things, free will is not some mystical force. With enough understanding it can be controlled, just like any machine.

The second article raises a question. If we advanced that technology enough so that one person could usurp control over another person, would the usurped stop being human simple because it lost its free will? A little chip implanted in the brain at birth, or with nanotechnology at the moment of conception, could easily encode a hardwired shutdown response to a verbal codeword.

It isn't the same because you never have absolute control over the conditioned human. You do over the synth. I already illustrated this point and you have not found a way to refute it.

@OP: You seem to have mixed the BoS and the Institute up. If you play through the Institute they want the Railroad out of the picture because they're the ones letting all the Synths out and the Institute want to bring the synths back in so that they don't disrupt life above ground. They want the BoS out of the picture because the BoS will stop at nothing to destroy or capture everything and leave the common man to rot. Even in the speech that you transmit to the Commonwealth the Institute wants you to say "If you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone".

You do not have absolute control. You have very little control actually. You have a single powerful command which shuts them down. After that you have to wipe their personality and start from scratch. Can you walk up to a synth who has escaped and command him to come back peacefully? Can you command it to do ANYTHING, other than to force shutdown?

Which again....nobody would let a mentally ill man run free or a killer or a spy.....these sorts are harshly dealt with. By following the synth logic acting towards ensuring public safety from a group known with absolute certainty to be 100% programmed to spy and kill is "discrimination".....why don't we make prisons for turrets then? That'll sure show them.....seriously though, robots are just robots....nothing else, nothing more. No matter how human like they may seem or how convincing the act they are just machines. Just like movies use very real looking puppets and you can't tell the difference when watching a movie.....same concept just a bit more advanced.

And the synth who killed people in Diamond City after mingling pleasantly with them?

Wrong. Absolute control over humans does not exist.....a human always has breaking points and points of resistance. A robot does not....ever. Synths commands can make them do absolutely anything including kill and they routinely erase certain bits from memory so that they are useless if captured and so on.

I get what you are saying, and yes, synths looking and acting human actually makes it harder to argue for them because you have to get past that part. We are also machines, nothing more, nothing less, we are just different types of machines. Our cells are programmed, our dna is encoded. We act and react according to instincts that we have no control over. We are intelligent enough to learn and we have thought processes but nobody has ever proved that we are unique in that aspect. A lot of other animals are currently protected from experimentation because they are intelligent too. Why is it impossible for intelligence to exist anywhere else but in an animal?

Humans are not machines......your argument just died and lost all validity with that single claim that they are.

You know what I mean, and if you are just going to debase this to wordplay and refuse to address the point then whatever. Perhaps machine was the wrong word, but using the wrong word doesn't invalidate everything else I said.

Of course people are machines.

What's confusing me is if you have a machine which perfectly replicates a human brain, how that's not a person.

Besides, didn't Doctor Amata say Synths have organic brains?

Would you say that Nick is a person? if so, why?

They don't replicate human brains....they are nothing like human brains. This is revealed when dealing with Curie.....it cannot operate in a human brain because they are nothing alike. A synth can only emulate human-like behavior. Like a puppet with a button that makes it say mama/dada......doesn't mean that puppet can recognize someone is in front of it nor that it has the slightest clue what a parent is.

Probably because Nick thinks.

Cognito ergo sum.

Codsworth, by this same logic, is a person too.

Albeit a somewhat stupid and mono-maniacally obsessive one.

Codsworth is a bit unique amongst Mister Handy's, though, since Deeker is one he comments on being non-sentient. I wonder if he has more advanced programming or if he's like John Henry Eden who spontaneously gained sentience due to running so long.

That would not at all be what I got from Curie's quest. What I got was Synths can store data better than a human brain (probably because of the cybernetic enhancement) and can carry Curie's data and memories. Likewise, that they were otherwise identical fleshy things which feel love, compassion, joy, hate, fear, and boredom.

All emotions Curie feels and points out she feels which, as a science droid, she would not be programmed to.

Ergo, they work (almost) exactly like human brains.

Perhaps a wee bit better.

Does he though? He emulates the behavior patterns of a long dead person.....that doesn't make him the dead person nor does it make him a person. Nick is an advanced data anolysis machine.

Yeah, depends on your definition of person, he is not human anyway, so if you have to be human to be a person then not a person. But then, is an intelligent alien lifeform a person? They are not human either, is that really the question. Is he intelligent, is he sapient, is he sentient? I have no idea if he is or not.

Prove you are sentient?