Fear

Fear

Suffering is present-tense: the viability boundary is here, now, pressing in. Fear is its temporal projection—the same negative gradient, but anticipated rather than actual. It is defined by three dimensions:

• $\valence < 0$ (anticipated negative gradient)
• $\mathcal{CF}$ high, concentrated on threat trajectories (the not-yet dominates)
• $\mathcal{SM}$ high (self foregrounded as the thing-that-might-be-harmed)

Arousal is typically high but not defining—cold fear exists. Integration and rank vary.

Fear is suffering projected into the future. The temporal structure ($\mathcal{CF}$) is essential: fear lives in anticipation. The self-model must be salient because fear is fundamentally about threat to the self. Remove the counterfactual weight (make it present-focused) and you get suffering. Remove the self-salience (make it about external objects) and you get something closer to aversion or disgust.

The somatic/anticipatory split maps exactly onto a deeper distinction: reactivity versus understanding. Somatic fear is reactive — it responds to present-state gradient information, and its channels (valence depression, arousal elevation, threat-orientation) are decomposable in principle. Each can be addressed independently by targeting its driving signal. Anticipatory anxiety is understanding — the system is comparing possible futures, and those comparisons inherently couple across any partition between self, environment, and time. This is why cognitive restructuring for anxiety operates on the framing of possibilities, not on individual signal channels: you cannot reduce anticipatory anxiety by adjusting one dimension at a time, because the dimensions are bound together by the counterfactual comparison that constitutes the experience.

The emergence ladder (Part VII) predicts a sharp distinction between two levels of fear. Somatic fear — negative valence, high arousal, threat-oriented behavior — is a pre-reflective affect requiring only viability-gradient detection (emergence rung 1–3). It does not require the counterfactual weight dimension at all. Anticipatory anxiety — fear of what might happen — requires counterfactual capacity (CF > 0), which is a rung 8 capacity blocked in systems without embodied agency. The Lenia experiments confirm this prediction exactly: patterns show negative valence and high arousal under resource scarcity, but CF ≈ 0 throughout the evolutionary runs because the patterns cannot imagine alternative futures. The implication for human psychology: anxiety as a clinical phenomenon (characterized by imagining feared futures, not just responding to present threats) should emerge developmentally at the same time as mental time travel and theory of mind — approximately age 3–4 — rather than being present from birth. The infant's fear is somatic. The child's anxiety is reflective.