The Affect Signature of Inhibition

The Affect Signature of Inhibition

$\iota$ is not another dimension of affect. It is a meta-parameter governing the coupling structure between all the structural dimensions—a dial that changes how the axes relate to each other and to perception.

The central affect-geometric cost of high $\iota$ is reduced integration. Participatory perception couples perception, affect, agency-modeling, and narrative into a single integrated process. Mechanistic perception factorizes them into separate modules—perception here, emotion there, causal reasoning somewhere else. The factorization is useful because modular systems are easier to debug, verify, and communicate about. But factorization reduces $\intinfo$, and reduced $\intinfo$ is reduced experiential richness. The world goes dead because you have learned to experience it in parts rather than as a whole.

The mechanism behind the effective rank shift deserves explicit statement. When you perceive something at low $\iota$—participatorily, as alive and interior—your representation of it must encode dimensions for its goals, its beliefs, its emotional states, its narrative arc, its possible intentions, its relationship to you. Each attribution of interiority adds representational dimensions along which the perceived object can vary. A tree perceived participatorily varies in mood, in receptivity, in seasonal intention, in its relationship to the grove. A tree perceived mechanistically varies in height, diameter, species, leaf color. The first representation has higher effective rank because more dimensions carry meaningful variance. This is not projection in the dismissive sense—it is the natural consequence of modeling something as a subject rather than an object. Subjects have more degrees of freedom than objects because interiority is high-dimensional. The $\effrank$ collapse at high $\iota$ is not a loss of information about the world; it is a loss of the dimensions along which the world was being modeled. The world becomes simpler because you have decided—or been trained—to perceive it as having fewer degrees of freedom than it might.

Follow this consequence to its end. If the identity thesis is right—if experience is integrated cause-effect structure—then $\iota$ does not merely change the quality of perception. It changes the quantity of experience. This inference requires a specific step that should be made explicit: IIT identifies $\intinfo$ as the quantity of consciousness, not merely its quality. A system with $\intinfo = 10$ is more conscious (has more phenomenal content, more irreducible distinctions, more of what-it-is-like-ness) than a system with $\intinfo = 5$, in the same sense that a system with more mass has more gravitational pull. This is a controversial claim within IIT (and one of its most debated features), but given the identity thesis, it follows: if experience IS integrated cause-effect structure, then more integration is literally more experience. One might object that factorized perception could be differently structured rather than less structured—that compartmentalized modules might each carry their own experience. IIT’s response is that the experience of the whole system is determined by the integration of the whole, not the sum of its parts’ integrations. Factorization reduces the whole-system $\intinfo$ even if individual modules retain local integration. The mechanistic perceiver may have rich modular processing, but the unified experience—the single subject—has less phenomenal content.

Given this, a system at high $\iota$ has genuinely lower $\intinfo$, genuinely fewer irreducible distinctions, genuinely less phenomenal structure. The mechanistic perceiver does not see the same world with less coloring; they have a structurally impoverished experience in the precise sense that IIT defines. The “dead world” of mechanism is not an illusion painted over a rich inner life. It is a real reduction in what it is like to be that system. The cost of high $\iota$ is not just meaning—it is consciousness itself, measured in the only units that consciousness comes in.

This cuts both ways. If low $\iota$ increases $\intinfo$, then participatory perception is not merely a “warmer” way of seeing—it is a richer experience in the structural sense, with more integrated distinctions, more phenomenal content, more of what the identity thesis says experience is. The animist is not confused. The animist is more conscious, in the IIT sense, of the thing being perceived. Whether the additional phenomenal content is accurate—whether the rock really has interiority—is a separate question from whether the perceiver has more experience while perceiving it.

The trajectory-selection framework (Part I) reveals a further consequence. If $\iota$ governs the breadth of the measurement distribution—how much of possibility space the system samples through attention—then $\iota$ governs the range of accessible trajectories. A low-$\iota$ system attends broadly: to agency, narrative, interiority, counterfactual futures, relational possibilities. Its effective measurement distribution is wide. It samples a large region of state space and consequently has access to a large set of diverging trajectories. A high-$\iota$ system attends narrowly: to mechanism, position, force, present state. Its measurement distribution is peaked. It samples a small region and follows a more constrained trajectory. The phenomenological consequence is that high $\iota$ feels deterministic. The mechanistic worldview is not merely an intellectual position about whether the universe is governed by law. It is a perceptual configuration that literally narrows the set of trajectories the system can select from. The world feels like a machine because the observer has contracted its measurement apparatus to sample only machine-like features. Low-$\iota$ systems experience more accessible futures, more agency, more openness—not because they have violated physical law, but because their broader attention pattern selects from a wider set of physically-available trajectories.