Notation

This part uses the salient coordinates defined in Parts I–II: five world-axes — $\valence$ (valence), $\arousal$ (arousal), $\intinfo$ (integration), $\effrank$ (effective rank), $\mathcal{CF}$ (counterfactual weight) — together with an entity-directed salience family whose diagonal is self-model salience $\mathcal{SM}$, itself split into $\sigma_{\text{attention}}$ (the self as object of attention) and $\sigma_{\text{causal}}$ (the self as driver of action). The list is not a fixed six but an extensible set; the affect state $\mathbf{a}_t$ is characterized by whichever coordinates are relevant to the phenomenon under analysis—not all matter equally for every signature. Cultural forms, practices, and technologies can be characterized by their affect signatures—the structural features they reliably modulate. The perceptual mode through which these signatures are experienced is governed not by a single scalar but by three independent axes (Part II): $\alpha(x)$, the entity-indexed ascription field (how much interiority, agency, and teleology the system grants to entity $x$); $\kappa$, the coupling of the perceiver's own modes (perception, affect, agency, narrative coupled versus factorized — high $\kappa$ is the curved eigenskeleton felt as "meaning," low $\kappa$ is the flat skeleton in which the world goes dead); and $\gamma$, 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.