Affect as Constraint-Relative Evaluation - A Structural Specification

Affect is identified with the differentiated evaluation of a system's trajectory against self-maintained invariants under recursive maintenance, a theoretical commitment that earns its standing through what it enables: dependency placement, dissociation predictions, verdicts on artificial systems and the philosophical zombie, diagnostic error modes for attribution, and empirical predictions distinguishing it from competing accounts. The paper specifies structural conditions for affect, places it in a dependency hierarchy between recursive maintenance and the conscious regime, distinguishes it from neighbor concepts, and addresses falsifiability through four specified failure conditions. Three companion papers develop applications to artificial systems, the philosophical zombie, and empirical measurement.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Current accounts of affect in the philosophy of mind, affective neuroscience, and consciousness studies fall into three broad classes — phenomenological, functional, and eliminativist — each presupposing a shared prior assumption that none specifies: that the systems under analysis are bounded, persisting units whose affective states can be coherently analyzed. Adjacent traditions (autopoiesis/enactivism, active inference, allostatic regulation) move closer to the structural question but do not isolate the specific condition this paper addresses. The paper identifies affect with the differentiated evaluation of trajectory against self-maintained invariants under recursive maintenance. This identification is proposed as a theoretical commitment rather than derived; it earns its standing through what it enables: a dependency placement that yields specific dissociation predictions, applied verdicts on artificial systems and the philosophical zombie, diagnostic error modes for attribution decisions, and empirical predictions that distinguish the framework from competing accounts. The paper specifies the structural conditions under which affect obtains, places affect in a dependency hierarchy between recursive maintenance and the conscious regime, distinguishes the framework from neighbor concepts at the level of detail the engagement requires, traces the regime behavior the placement entails, and provides self-contained treatments of the inherited concepts from the Closure Before Consciousness framework. Falsifiability is addressed through four specified conditions under which the framework would fail. Three companion papers develop applications to artificial systems, the philosophical zombie, and the empirical measurement program.