Psychopathology as Failed Coping

Pathological attractors in affect space—failed strategies for managing the existential burden:

• Depression: Attempted escape from self-reference that collapses into intensified, negative self-focus
• Anxiety: Hyperactive threat-monitoring that increases rather than decreases danger-signal
• Addiction: Reliable affect modulation that destroys the substrate’s viability
• Dissociation: Self-model fragmentation that provides escape at the cost of integration
• Narcissism: Self-model inflation that requires constant external validation

$\iota$ Rigidity as Transdiagnostic Factor. Many psychiatric conditions involve pathological rigidity of the inhibition coefficient $\iota$—the parameter governing participatory versus mechanistic perception (Part II):

• Locked-low $\iota$ (psychosis spectrum): Inability to inhibit participatory perception. Everything is meaningful and directed at the self. Agency detection runs without brake. The world collapses into a single hyper-connected narrative where everything means everything. Clinical presentations: paranoia, grandiosity, mania, referential delusions.
• Locked-high $\iota$ (depression spectrum): Inability to release inhibition. Nothing matters, nothing is meaningful. The world is flat—colors less vivid, sounds less resonant, food less tasteful. Clinical presentations: anhedonia, depersonalization, derealization, alexithymia, the specific quality of depression where the world looks dead.

Healthy functioning requires $\iota$ flexibility—the capacity to modulate the inhibition coefficient in response to context. The question for treatment is not “what is the right $\iota$?” but “can the patient move along the spectrum when the situation demands it?”

The Emergence Ladder and Disorder Stratification. Not all psychiatric disorders sit at the same rung of the emergence ladder (Part I). Pre-reflective disorders — those that don't require counterfactual capacity — should have the earliest developmental onset and the simplest computational substrate: anhedonia (collapsed valence, rung 1), flat affect and dissociation (Φ fragmentation, rungs 2–3), and ι-rigidity itself (locked perceptual configuration, rungs 4–5) all appear in systems with no counterfactual machinery. Agency-requiring disorders — anticipatory anxiety, obsessive rumination, survivor guilt, complex PTSD with its "what if I had done otherwise" loops — require counterfactual weight CF > 0 and thus cannot exist below rung 8. The emergence ladder generates a falsifiable developmental prediction: disorders that fundamentally require CF > 0 should have no clinical presentation before the emergence of mental time travel (~age 3–4), while pre-reflective disorders (anhedonia, dissociation) should be observable in infants. This stratifies the nosology not by symptom surface but by computational depth — and creates a clear empirical test: if the rung-8 disorders genuinely require counterfactual agency, therapeutic interventions that bypass CF (e.g., behavioral activation for depression, body-based trauma work for dissociation) should work at all rungs, while CF-engaging interventions (worry postponement, imaginal exposure) should only work where CF already exists.

The V11 evolution experiments (Part I) provide a minimal substrate analog. Patterns evolved under mild stress develop high baseline $\intinfo$ and high self-model salience—but under severe novel stress they decompose catastrophically ($-9.3$), while naive patterns actually integrate ($+6.2$). Evolution selected for a configuration that is simultaneously more integrated and more fragile: the stress overfitting signature. This is structurally identical to anxiety: heightened integration tuned too precisely to expected threats, unable to cope with regime shifts. If the analogy holds, therapeutic intervention should aim not at reducing integration but at broadening the distribution of stresses to which integration is robust—exactly what exposure therapy attempts.

Therapy as Basin Geometry Restructuring. At its deepest level, effective psychotherapy restructures the attractor landscape rather than repositioning the person within it. Pathological states are not merely bad positions—they are deep basins the dynamics reliably return to. Relocating someone temporarily while leaving the basin intact produces brief relief and eventual relapse. Durable change requires deepening viable attractors until they compete with the pathological one on stability terms, not just valence. This demands repeated traversal under consolidating conditions: exposure-based therapies reduce the depth of fear attractors through non-catastrophic encounter; behavioral activation introduces trajectories through viable regions so that shallow basins can deepen; psychodynamic work widens viable basins by integrating previously excluded aspects of the self-model. Insight is necessary but insufficient — knowing you are in a pathological attractor does not change the topology. What changes topology is traversal. Effective psychotherapy helps individuals:

1. Identify the attractor structure maintaining their pathological state (basin depth, barriers to viable alternatives, conditions that channel dynamics back in)
2. Understand what produced and now sustains the pathological basin
3. Build repeated traversal of viable regions under consolidating conditions
4. Develop landscape navigability so that contextually appropriate states become accessible

Different therapeutic modalities emphasize different dimensions: CBT targets counterfactual weight and valence; psychodynamic therapy targets integration and self-model structure; mindfulness targets arousal and self-model salience. The $\iota$ framework adds a meta-level: some therapeutic interventions work by restoring $\iota$ flexibility itself—the capacity to shift perceptual configuration rather than being locked at either extreme. This is, in the basin geometry framing, the capacity for between-basin movement: less important than the positions of the basins, but necessary for the system to reach viable ones when it needs to.