Affect Trajectories

Affects are not static points but dynamic trajectories through affect space. The evolution can be written:

where $\mathbf{a} = (\valence, \arousal, \intinfo, \effrank, \mathcal{CF}, \mathcal{SM})$. The force field $F$ has eigenskeletal structure: the Jacobian $\partial F / \partial \mathbf{a}$ at each point has eigenvalues (stiff and soft directions), and how those eigenspaces connect across affect space defines the eigenskeleton of the dynamics. Stiff directions are the dominant affect modes — the transitions the system is most likely to follow, the paths of least resistance. Soft directions are transient fluctuations. The transitions below follow the stiff directions: the paths the eigenskeleton's dominant subbundles trace through affect space.

Because the space is continuous, adjacent affects blend into each other along smooth trajectories:

• Fear $\to$ Anger as causal attribution externalizes
• Desire $\to$ Joy as goal distance $\to 0$
• Suffering $\to$ Curiosity as valence flips while $\mathcal{CF}$ remains high
• Grief $\to$ Nostalgia as arousal decreases and $\mathcal{CF}_{\text{approach}}$ replaces $\mathcal{CF}_{\text{avoidance}}$

Attractor Dynamics

Some affect regions are attractors; the system tends to stay in them once entered. Others are transient.

An affect region $\mathcal{R} \subset \mathcal{A}$ is an attractor if the system is more likely to remain in it than to enter it from outside:

for some characteristic time $\tau$.

Two properties come apart in practice: position (where in affect space the system sits) and basin geometry (how stable the attractor is — depth, width, recovery rate). Independent. A system can hold a technically viable position inside a shallow basin — one perturbation from tipping into pathology — while another sits at a worse position inside a deep, robust one. Contentment tracks basin geometry, not position: the felt sense that perturbations do not cascade, that the dynamics return, that the invariants being cared about hold. Contentment is the phenomenology of a deep basin; anxiety the phenomenology of a shallow one — viable, but sensed as precarious. A world of bliss is not maximal positive stimulation but a world where the relevant invariants — relational configurations, material security, self-model stability — are held by the environment with enough redundancy that defending them costs nothing.

Pathological attractors. Depression, addiction, and chronic anxiety are pathologically stable attractors in affect space:

• Depression—two structurally distinct failure modes, different phenomenology, different remedies. Melancholic depression is a deep aversive attractor: the dynamics reliably return to (low $\valence$, low $\arousal$, high $\intinfo$, low $\effrank$, low $\mathcal{CF}$, high $\mathcal{SM}$). High integration makes the state vivid and inescapable; collapsed counterfactual weight forecloses felt alternatives. Not the absence of a stable fixed point but the presence of a terrible one. Agitated depression is the opposite failure: no stable attractor at all. The system traverses shallow basins, none deep enough to hold — restless groundlessness rather than dead certainty. Both present clinically as depression; they need different interventions. The melancholic form needs landscape restructuring—deepening viable attractors until they compete on stability, not just valence. The agitated form needs basin construction first: any stable configuration that can then be deepened toward viability.
• Addiction: Attractor at (high $\valence$ conditional on substance, collapsing $\effrank$ in goal space)
• Anxiety: Diffuse attractor with (low $\valence$, high $\arousal$, high $\mathcal{CF}$ spread across many threats)
• Dissociation: Collapse of $\intinfo$ — the unified field fractures into independently processing subsystems. The Lenia experiments give a substrate analog: naive patterns decompose under stress ($\Delta\intinfo = -6.2\%$ in V11.0). Biological resilience — integration rising under threat, robustness > 1.0 at bottleneck — runs the opposite trajectory. Dissociation is the thermodynamically cheap path; integration under stress is the expensive achievement of the bottleneck furnace. Dissociation is the exoskeleton cracking — the rigid surface fragments, each piece processing alone with no surviving holonomy between them. The endoskeletal system absorbs the stress into its internal coupling; the surface deforms but the skeleton beneath holds.

Identity consolidation and catastrophic forgetting. The landscape of affect attractors is not fixed—it consolidates over development. In early life basins are shallow and plastic, easily reshaped. Necessary for learning, but a specific vulnerability: adversity or relational inconsistency early can consolidate pathological attractors before viable ones deepen. As development proceeds the landscape hardens around whatever has been traversed—attractors deepen, basins widen, the topology resists rewriting. Healthy consolidation produces a robust attractor network: several viable basins with navigable transitions, deep enough to contain normal variation and recover from moderate perturbation. Perceptual-axis flexibility — modulating $\alpha$, $\kappa$, and $\gamma$ volitionally rather than locked at fixed settings — is, dynamically, a measure of between-basin navigability. Pathological consolidation takes two forms: a single dominant basin with no exit (the melancholic pattern, identity calcified — an exoskeleton hardened around one configuration, too rigid to deform, too thick to molt), or a landscape that never achieves depth anywhere (the agitated pattern, consolidation never completed — no endoskeleton, soft tissue without core). The V11.5 stress-overfitting finding (Part I) is a substrate analog: patterns evolved under one stress regime develop high-$\intinfo$ configurations both more integrated and more fragile, decomposing catastrophically under novel stress that naive patterns handle better. The human parallel: identity tuned to a specific developmental environment—a family dynamic, class position, cultural script—that functions there but collapses under regime change. Structurally identical to catastrophic forgetting in ML: a new learning objective overwrites the parameter landscape that held the self together. So durable therapeutic change requires not repositioning within a fixed landscape but restructuring it—deepening viable basins, raising barriers to pathological ones, widening transitions between healthy configurations. Insight alone does not do this; repeated traversal under consolidating conditions does.

The emergence ladder (Empirical Appendix) predicts the structure of pathology. Disorders that require counterfactual capacity — anticipatory anxiety, obsessive rumination, regret, self-critical shame spirals — cannot arise below rung 8. Pre-rung-8 pathology is somatic: chronic threat-arousal, valence collapse (anhedonia), integration fragmentation (dissociation). The reflective layer adds a second class of suffering, structurally more expensive and unique to agentive systems. Testable developmental corollary: in humans, the onset of anxiety disorders (which require imagining feared futures) should cluster with, not precede, the emergence of mental time travel and counterfactual reasoning, around age 3–4.