Part II: Identity Thesis
Summary of Part II
Summary of Part II
- Hard problem dissolved: Rejecting the privileged base layer removes the demand for reduction. Experience is real at the experiential scale, just as chemistry is real at the chemical scale.
- Identity thesis: Experience is intrinsic cause-effect structure. An identity claim, not a correlation.
- Geometric phenomenology: Different affects correspond to different structural motifs. Rather than forcing all affects into a fixed grid, the defining dimensions for each are identified — the features without which the affect would not be that affect.
- 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.
- Suffering explained: High integration + low rank = intense but trapped. The core structural insight — why suffering feels more real than neutral states yet also inescapable.
- Operational measures: Protocols for measuring structural features in both artificial and biological systems, with the understanding that not all measures are relevant to all phenomena.