Part VII: Empirical Program

Psychopathology as Geometric Deformation

If affect has geometric structure, then pathology is geometric deformation. The framework generates specific predictions:

Depression: Collapsed effective rank ( $r_{\text{eff}}$ ) — the representational space narrows, fewer possibilities are entertained. Reduced valence gradient sensitivity — approach and withdrawal become indistinguishable. High $\iota$ — the world appears mechanical, stripped of participatory meaning. Experimentally: our Lenia patterns at high stress sometimes show exactly this profile: reduced representational dimensionality, flattened valence gradients, increased inhibition coefficient.
Anxiety: Elevated counterfactual weight ( $\text{CF}$ ) — excessive probability mass on non-actual possibilities. High arousal ( $A$ ) sustained beyond the timescale of the triggering stimulus. The framework predicts that anxiety requires rung 8 (counterfactual reasoning). Systems without agency cannot be anxious — they can be stressed (high arousal, negative valence) but not anxious (which requires imagining what might go wrong).
Dissociation: Reduced integration ( $\intinfo$ ) — the unified field fragments into independently processing subsystems. This is precisely what our naive patterns show under stress: they decompose. Biological systems that increase integration under stress (robustness > 1.0) are doing the opposite of dissociation. The framework predicts dissociation is a failure of the mechanism that the bottleneck furnace creates — a reversion to the thermodynamically cheaper pattern of decomposition.
Flow states: Low $\iota$ (participatory perception), high $\intinfo$ (unified processing), moderate arousal calibrated to challenge. The $\iota$ finding (Experiment 8) suggests flow is not exotic — it is a return to the default perceptual mode that development and socialization typically suppress.

These predictions are testable with existing methods. EEG/MEG proxies for integration (transfer entropy, Lempel-Ziv complexity), behavioral proxies for effective rank (exploration-exploitation balance), and self-report measures of $\iota$ (participatory experience scales) could validate or falsify the geometric deformation hypothesis without solving the coupling wall. The bridge to psychology need not wait for the substrate problem to be solved.