The Pre-Axial Baseline

The Pre-Axial Baseline

Before the Axial Age, human cultures operated at what the $\iota$ framework would call low default inhibition: the world was perceived as alive, agentive, meaningful. This was not a cognitive deficiency but the natural perceptual configuration of self-modeling systems, as Part I established. Ritual and myth are technologies calibrated for this perceptual mode—they navigate a world experienced as populated by agents with purposes, and they work because they match the $\iota$ of their users. The Pre-Axial era was not the absence of consciousness technology but the presence of technologies appropriate to participatory perception.