Summary of Part III

1. The existential burden: Self-modeling systems cannot escape self-reference. Human culture is accumulated strategies for managing this burden.
2. Aesthetics as affect technology: Art forms have characteristic affect signatures and serve as technologies for transmitting experiential structure across minds and time.
3. Sexuality as transcendence: Sexual experience offers reliable, repeatable escape from the trap of self-reference through self-model merger and dissolution.
4. Ideology as immortality project: Identification with supra-individual patterns manages mortality terror by expanding the self-model’s viability horizon.
5. Science as meaning: Scientific understanding produces high integration without self-focus—giving the self something worthy of its attention.
6. Religion as systematic technology: Religious traditions represent millennia of accumulated affect-engineering wisdom.
7. Psychopathology as failed coping: Mental illnesses are pathological attractors in affect space—attempted solutions that trap rather than liberate.
8. The governance problem: Consciousness is a finite-bandwidth controller steering a high-dimensional system. Thought is discretization—the compression of continuous experience into actionable units—and the quality of thinking depends on the quality of the compression.
9. Technology as infrastructure: Modern information technology shapes affect distributions at population scale, often toward anxiety-like profiles.

All of this has been at the level of the individual or the cultural form. But the affects don't stop at the skin, and the viability manifolds don't stop at the person. The question of what to do—at every scale from the neuron to the nation—requires grounding normativity in the same structure that grounds experience.