Summary of Part II

1. Hard problem factored, not dissolved: Rejecting the privileged base layer removes the demand for reduction — experience is real at the experiential scale, as chemistry is at the chemical scale — but the existence residue (why there is anything it is like at all) remains, posited across via the identity thesis as a flagged working axiom. The soft shell (why this character rather than that) is tractable; the hard core is not dissolved.
2. Identity thesis: Experience is intrinsic cause-effect structure. 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, the defining dimensions for each are identified — the features without which the 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. The core structural insight — why suffering feels more real than neutral states yet also inescapable.
6. 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.

The geometry, the identity thesis, and the perceptual axes — ascription, coupling, gain — are in place. 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 the geometry is in view.