Summary of Part II

1. Hard problem dissolved: By rejecting the privileged base layer, I’ve removed the demand for reduction. Experience is real at the experiential scale, just as chemistry is real at the chemical scale.
2. Identity thesis: Experience is intrinsic cause-effect structure. This is an identity claim, not a correlation.
3. Geometric phenomenology: Different affects correspond to different structural motifs. Rather than forcing all affects into a fixed grid, we identify the defining dimensions for each—the features without which that affect would not be that affect.
4. Variable dimensionality: Joy requires four dimensions (valence, integration, rank, self-salience). Suffering requires three (valence, integration, rank). Anger requires other-model compression. Each affect gets the dimensions it needs.
5. Suffering explained: High integration + low rank = intense but trapped. This is the core structural insight—why suffering feels more real than neutral states yet also inescapable.
6. Operational measures: I’ve provided protocols for measuring structural features in both artificial and biological systems, with the understanding that not all measures are relevant to all phenomena.

We now have the geometry, the identity thesis, and the inhibition coefficient. What remains is to use them. Given that affect has this structure, what have humans done with it? Every cultural form—art, sex, ideology, science, religion, psychotherapy—is a technology for navigating affect space, developed through millennia of trial, transmitted through imitation, ritual, and institution. The patterns become visible once you have the geometry to see them.