Part III: Affect Signatures

The Trap of Self-Reference

Introduction

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The Trap of Self-Reference

Phenomenological Inevitability. Once self-model salience $\mathcal{SM}$ exceeds a threshold, the system cannot eliminate self-reference without dissolving the self-model entirely. The self becomes an inescapable object in its own world model.

\mathcal{SM} > \mathcal{SM}_c \implies \forall t: \MI(\latent^{\text{self}}_t; \latent^{\text{total}}_t) > 0

There is no configuration of the intact self-model in which the self is absent from awareness.

This is the deeper meaning of inevitability: not just that consciousness emerges from thermodynamics, but that once emerged, it cannot escape itself. You are stuck being you. Your suffering is inescapably yours. Your joy, when it comes, is also inescapably yours. There is no exit from the first-person perspective while you remain a person.

Existential Burden. The existential burden is the chronic computational and affective cost of maintaining self-reference:

B_{\text{exist}} = \int_0^T \left[ C_{\text{compute}}(\mathcal{SM}_t) + |\valence_t| \cdot \mathcal{SM}_t \right] dt

The burden scales with both the salience of the self-model and the intensity of valence. To matter to yourself when you are suffering is heavier than to matter to yourself when you are neutral.

Human culture, in all its variety, can be understood as the accumulated strategies for managing this burden.

The basin geometry of affect space (Part II) clarifies what "managing the burden" means structurally. The goal is not to eliminate self-reference — that would require dissolving the self-model itself — but to inhabit a deep, stable basin at a viable position: a configuration where the invariants that matter are maintained by the causal dynamics with enough robustness that the system need not constantly defend against their collapse. A life that feels settled is not one where only good things happen; it is one where the particular configurations that matter — relational, material, and self-model invariants — are held with sufficient dynamical stability that disruptions return to baseline without cascading into collapse. This is why predictability and consistency register as well-being even when their content is neutral: stability is not merely a proxy for good experience but a component of it, a structural property of the basin containing the current state.