Pre-Reflective Affect: What Comes for Free

Pre-Reflective Affect: What Comes for Free

The first seven rungs correspond to the background of conscious experience — the stream of feeling that is always present, rarely attended to, and not intrinsically about anything. In psychological terms:

• Mood (rung 1): The tonic valence gradient — approach or withdrawal as a whole-body orientation. Our experiments show this is geometrically inevitable. Any viable system has it. This is consistent with the psychological finding that mood is always present, precedes appraisal, and influences perception before cognition begins.
• Arousal (rung 1): Processing intensity as a dimension of state space. Not identical to sympathetic activation but functionally analogous. Present in every substrate tested.
• Habituation and sensitization (rungs 2–3): World models and compressed representations emerge under selection. The patterns that survive bottlenecks are the ones that have learned — across evolutionary time — what matters and what can be ignored. This is the computational analog of attentional learning.
• Animistic perception (rung 4): The tendency to attribute agency to non-agents. Computationally, this is the cheapest compression: reuse the model you have for agents on everything else. The developmental trajectory from childhood animism to adult mechanistic perception is a movement from low to high $\iota$ — and our experiments show this requires training. The default is animistic.
• Emotional coherence (rung 5): The fact that feelings "make sense" — that there is a reliable mapping between internal states and behavioral tendencies. This develops over evolution (Experiment 7) and is not present at the start. Psychological implication: emotional coherence is an achievement of developmental history, not a given of neural architecture.
• Temporal depth (rung 6): The capacity to carry the past into the present. Memory is selectable: 2/3 evolutionary lineages chose longer retention. But 1/3 discarded memory entirely — a natural control showing that temporal integration is a strategic choice, not an inevitability. The psychological analog: some organisms (and some people) operate with minimal temporal integration, and this is a viable strategy, not a deficit.

None of these require awareness. None require a self. They are the geometry of being alive — present in bacteria, in Lenia patterns, and (the framework predicts) in any sufficiently complex system navigating resource constraints. When Part II claims that experience has geometric structure, this is the empirical grounding.