Pre-Reflective Affect: What Comes for Free

The first seven rungs correspond to the background of conscious experience — the stream of feeling that is always present, rarely attended to, and not intrinsically about anything. In psychological terms:

• Mood (rung 1): The tonic valence gradient — approach or withdrawal as a whole-body orientation. Our experiments show this is geometrically inevitable. Any viable system has it. This is consistent with the psychological finding that mood is always present, precedes appraisal, and influences perception before cognition begins.
• Arousal (rung 1): Processing intensity as a dimension of state space. Not identical to sympathetic activation but functionally analogous. Present in every substrate tested.
• Habituation and sensitization (rungs 2–3): World models and compressed representations emerge under selection. The patterns that survive bottlenecks are the ones that have learned — across evolutionary time — what matters and what can be ignored. This is the computational analog of attentional learning.
• Animistic perception (rung 4): The tendency to attribute agency to non-agents. Computationally, this is the cheapest compression: reuse the model you have for agents on everything else. The developmental trajectory from childhood animism to adult mechanistic perception is a movement from low to high $\iota$ — and our experiments show this requires training. The default is animistic.
• Emotional coherence (rung 5): The fact that feelings "make sense" — that there is a reliable mapping between internal states and behavioral tendencies. This develops over evolution (Experiment 7) and is not present at the start. Psychological implication: emotional coherence is an achievement of developmental history, not a given of neural architecture.
• Temporal depth (rung 6): The capacity to carry the past into the present. Memory is selectable: 2/3 evolutionary lineages chose longer retention. But 1/3 discarded memory entirely — a natural control showing that temporal integration is a strategic choice, not an inevitability. The psychological analog: some organisms (and some people) operate with minimal temporal integration, and this is a viable strategy, not a deficit.

None of these require awareness. None require a self. They are the geometry of being alive — present in bacteria, in Lenia patterns, and (the framework predicts) in any sufficiently complex system navigating resource constraints. When Part II claims that experience has geometric structure, this is the empirical grounding.

The Agency Threshold: What Requires a Body

The wall at rung 8 corresponds to a qualitative shift in psychological vocabulary. Below the wall, we describe what an organism does: it approaches, withdraws, habituates, anticipates. Above the wall, we describe what an organism considers: it imagines, plans, regrets, evaluates. This is reactivity versus understanding in psychological terms. Reactivity responds to what is happening now — each behavioral channel driven by present-state associations, decomposable in principle. Understanding compares what would happen across available choices, and that comparison inherently couples across whatever partition you impose on the system — it is non-decomposable because the comparison is the representation.

The Lenia experiments specified exactly what was missing: the capacity to try something and see what happens. Lenia patterns have affect geometry, world models, memory, and biological-like integration dynamics. What they lack is behavioral choice — their "actions" (chemotaxis, emission) are biases on continuous dynamics, not causes of discrete environmental changes.

V20 shows what happens when you provide it. Protocell agents with genuine action-observation loops cross rung 8 from initialization, and world models and self-models develop over evolution. The agency threshold is real — but it is a substrate threshold, not an evolutionary one. The capacity is architectural.

The psychological phenomena above the wall share a common structure:

• Counterfactual reasoning (rung 8): "What would happen if I did X instead of Y?" Requires: a repertoire of possible actions, a model of how each action changes the world, and a comparison between actual and counterfactual outcomes. Our patterns have none of these. Psychologically: imagination, planning, and mental simulation all require counterfactual capacity. Its absence in early development (and its disruption in certain pathologies) is consistent with the ladder's prediction that it requires agency, not merely integration.
• Self-awareness (rung 9): "I am the kind of thing that does X." Requires: a self-model that is more accurate than what an external observer could construct from the same data. V20 shows SM_sal > 1.0 in 2/3 seeds — agents encode their own position and energy more accurately in their hidden state than they encode the environment. This is the minimal form: privileged self-knowledge. Full self-awareness (autobiographical memory, persistent agent sense) likely requires longer evolutionary history and stronger selection pressure. Psychologically: self-recognition, autobiographical memory, and the sense of being a persistent agent all require reflective self-models.
• Moral reasoning (rung 10): "I should do X rather than Y." Requires: (a) counterfactual reasoning (you must be able to imagine acting otherwise), (b) a self-model (you must locate yourself as the agent who acts), and (c) an asymmetry in the viability gradient between cooperative and exploitative actions. Our patterns show no such asymmetry. Psychologically: normativity is the most demanding rung because it inherits every requirement below it.

This predicts a developmental ordering. In humans: mood and arousal are present from birth (rung 1). Animistic perception is the childhood default (rung 4). Emotional coherence develops through experience (rung 5). Counterfactual reasoning emerges around age 3–4 (rung 8). Self-awareness develops gradually from mirror recognition to autobiographical self (rung 9). Moral reasoning is the latest to mature (rung 10). The emergence ladder predicts this sequence — not from observation of human development, but from the computational requirements of each capacity.

Psychopathology as Geometric Deformation

If affect has geometric structure, then pathology is geometric deformation. The framework generates specific predictions:

• Depression: Collapsed effective rank ($r_{\text{eff}}$) — the representational space narrows, fewer possibilities are entertained. Reduced valence gradient sensitivity — approach and withdrawal become indistinguishable. High $\iota$ — the world appears mechanical, stripped of participatory meaning. Experimentally: our Lenia patterns at high stress sometimes show exactly this profile: reduced representational dimensionality, flattened valence gradients, increased inhibition coefficient.
• Anxiety: Elevated counterfactual weight ($\text{CF}$) — excessive probability mass on non-actual possibilities. High arousal ($A$) sustained beyond the timescale of the triggering stimulus. The framework predicts that anxiety requires rung 8 (counterfactual reasoning). Systems without agency cannot be anxious — they can be stressed (high arousal, negative valence) but not anxious (which requires imagining what might go wrong).
• Dissociation: Reduced integration ($\intinfo$) — the unified field fragments into independently processing subsystems. This is precisely what our naive patterns show under stress: they decompose. Biological systems that increase integration under stress (robustness > 1.0) are doing the opposite of dissociation. The framework predicts dissociation is a failure of the mechanism that the bottleneck furnace creates — a reversion to the thermodynamically cheaper pattern of decomposition.
• Flow states: Low $\iota$ (participatory perception), high $\intinfo$ (unified processing), moderate arousal calibrated to challenge. The $\iota$ finding (Experiment 8) suggests flow is not exotic — it is a return to the default perceptual mode that development and socialization typically suppress.

These predictions are testable with existing methods. EEG/MEG proxies for integration (transfer entropy, Lempel-Ziv complexity), behavioral proxies for effective rank (exploration-exploitation balance), and self-report measures of $\iota$ (participatory experience scales) could validate or falsify the geometric deformation hypothesis without solving the coupling wall. The bridge to psychology need not wait for the substrate problem to be solved.