Part III: Affect Signatures

Notation

Introduction
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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 structural affect dimensions defined in Parts I–II: Val\valence (valence), Ar\arousal (arousal), Φ\intinfo (integration), reff\effrank (effective rank), CF\mathcal{CF} (counterfactual weight), SM\mathcal{SM} (self-model salience), among others. The affect state at\mathbf{a}_t is characterized by whichever dimensions 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 inhibition coefficient ι\iota (Part II) governs the perceptual mode through which these signatures are experienced.

atValenceapproach ↔ avoidArousalhigh ↔ lowIntegration (Φ)unified ↔ fragmentedEffective Rankopen ↔ narrowCF Weightelsewhere ↔ presentSelf-Salienceself-aware ↔ absorbed