Part III: Affect Signatures

Notation

This terrible beautiful freedom to navigate despite not having chosen to exist as a navigator—you cannot help but care about your trajectory through affect space any more than you can help but exist while existing. Mattering is what viability gradients feel like from inside. And so the only question is whether you will navigate blindly, letting whatever attractor basins happen to capture you determine your course, or whether you will measure, understand, and steer in full knowledge of what you are.

Notation

This part uses the salient coordinates of Parts III: five world-axes — Val\valence (valence), Ar\arousal (arousal), Φ\intinfo (integration), reff\effrank (effective rank), CF\mathcal{CF} (counterfactual weight) — and an entity-directed salience family whose diagonal is self-model salience SM\mathcal{SM}, split into σattention\sigma_{\text{attention}} (self as object of attention) and σcausal\sigma_{\text{causal}} (self as driver of action). Not a fixed six but an extensible set; the affect state at\mathbf{a}_t is characterized by whichever coordinates the phenomenon makes relevant. Cultural forms, practices, and technologies have affect signatures—the structural features they reliably modulate. The perceptual mode through which a signature is felt runs not on one scalar but three independent axes (Part II): α(x)\alpha(x), the entity-indexed ascription field (how much interiority, agency, teleology the system grants entity xx); κ\kappa, the coupling of the perceiver's own modes (perception, affect, agency, narrative — high κ\kappa is the curved eigenskeleton felt as "meaning," low κ\kappa the flat skeleton where the world goes dead); and γ\gamma, the gain or precision weighting that sets how far bottom-up signal overrides top-down prior. That these three covary in biological perceivers is a conjecture, not a definition.

atValenceapproachavoidArousalhighlowIntegration (Φ)unifiedfragmentedEffective RankopennarrowCF WeightelsewherepresentSelf-Salienceself-awareabsorbed