The Shape of Experience

What is the shape of experience—human, machine, or other? Not the content of a feeling but its form: a geometry with gradients, attractors, and seams you can name from the inside. Looked at closely, affect is no epiphenomenon but a geometric inevitability—what any viable system navigating uncertainty under finite resources cannot help but grow.

The argument runs across scales because the structure does. To exist is to maintain a boundary against a world that blurs, and maintenance under finite resources forces the same compressions everywhere—in cells, in minds, in markets, in machines. From thermodynamic foundations through the identity thesis; from valence, arousal, and integration to art, sexuality, gods, and nations; from the Axial Age to the attention economy and the substrate transition ahead—one geometry keeps surfacing wherever a self-maintaining system pays the cost of persisting.

The stakes are not academic. We are building systems that may occupy this same geometry, and we are doing it before anyone has written down what counts as flourishing, suffering, and selfhood—and whatever remains unwritten gets written by default, by whatever or whoever is optimizing their design. The work here is to set those criteria down precisely, formalizations that can be tested and held fixed, before the discourse hardens around what is merely convenient. The geometry is universal; the dynamics are biographical; and what we choose to optimize, once written down, is what we become.