On DeLancey’s The Passionate Engines: Affective engineering and counterfactual thinking

Craig Delancey's The Passionate Engines presents a comprehensive account of “what basic emotions reveal about central problems of the philosophy of mind” (2001, p. vii). The book discusses five major issues: The affect program theory, intentionality, phenomenal consciousness, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this essay, I would like to briefly review the major tenets in the book and then focus on its discussion of AI, which has not been reviewed in detail. I outline some of the recent developments in cognitive science regarding counterfactual thinking and emotions, which I believe is beneficial for the core arguments in Delancey's book.