To the extent that the James-Lange theory is true, it raises some interesting questions about machine emotion. Would an android need a stomach, sweat glands, and a heart to feel emotions the same way that people do? If the machine could never know the taste of food or the feel of digestion, never have adrenaline rushing through its body priming it to fight or flee, could it have real emotions? I suspect it can have processes very similar, though probably not identical, to human emotion. We might have to give it sensors throughout its body to ground its emotions in a physical substrate.
