Narrative Self Café v13: Making a HASH of Hierarchical Feelings
Posted: February 9, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: affect, emotions, identity, purpose, systems, values Leave a commentSequel to Narrative Self Café v12: Affect as BASH (Bottlenecked Adaptive System Hysteresis)
Write aTom Stoppard–style dialogue where Karl Friston, Evan Thompson, Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, and surprise guest Nico Frijda start out fighting; then self-similarly realize “global integration” of affect implies partial integration (“premotion“) is possible, which in turn requires a post-BASH architecture.
ChatGPT Prompt
Setting: The same café. The chalkboard still reads BASH. Someone has added, underneath:
“Yes, but who is feeling it?”
Act I: The Incommensurability Problem
1. Opening: Immediate Disagreement
Panksepp (stabbing the chalkboard):
You’ve drawn a plumbing diagram and called it emotion.
Friston (calmly):
I’ve drawn the conditions under which emotion must arise.
Solms:
Karl, with respect, feelings are not what must arise. They are what matter.
Thompson:
Gentlemen, perhaps we should notice we’re already enacting the phenomenon. This room is thick with affect and no one has yet computed a boundary condition.
Friston:
Affect is the experience of precision-weighted prediction error.
Panksepp:
Affect is a subcortical command system that existed before your cortex learned Latin.
Solms:
Affect is how the organism knows whether it is going well or badly.
Thompson:
Affect is the organism’s way of being a world.
(They all pause. Stoppardian silence. Someone sips coffee too loudly.)
2. The Fight Clarifies the Target
Friston (drawing circles):
If BASH says affect is boundary strain, then the mistake is assuming the boundary is informational.
Panksepp:
It’s anatomical.
Solms:
It’s homeostatic.
Thompson:
It’s lived.
Friston:
It’s all of these. Because the boundary is the Markov blanket of a living system.
Panksepp:
You cannot feel a Markov blanket.
Solms (smiling):
But you can feel what happens when it fails.
(They look at the chalkboard again.)
3. The Realization: Global Integration Is Too Late
Thompson:
The article assumes affect appears when the system-wide bottleneck saturates.
Solms:
Yes — when integration fails.
Panksepp:
But animals feel long before system-wide anything.
Friston:
Of course. Global integration is metabolically expensive. You would go extinct if you had to compute the whole self before feeling.
(They all stop. This lands.)
Thompson:
So feeling cannot require global integration.
Solms:
It must occur at partial integration.
Panksepp:
At the level of subcortical command systems interacting with the body.
Friston:
At local minima of expected free energy — before convergence.
4. Naming the Missing Layer: “Premotion”
Thompson:
There is a phase before emotion becomes narratable.
Solms:
Before it becomes thinkable.
Panksepp:
Before cortex interferes.
Friston:
Before global belief updating.
Thompson:
A pre-reflective stirring.
Solms:
A felt tendency.
Panksepp:
A command without a story.
Friston:
A partial integration of prediction error into action readiness.
(They all speak at once.)
Premotion.
Silence. They stare at the word as if it has always been there.
5. Why BASH Is Incomplete
Solms:
BASH locates affect at the point of bottleneck.
Panksepp:
But affect begins upstream of the bottleneck.
Friston:
In fact, the bottleneck is detected because premotion is already present.
Thompson:
The system already cares before it is constrained.
Solms:
Care is primary.
Friston:
Constraint is secondary.
Panksepp:
Feeling is earlier than tension.
6. The Post-BASH Architecture
Friston redraws the diagram.
Not:
Complex system → bottleneck → affect
But:
Subcortical premotion → partial integration → affect → global integration → narrative self
Thompson:
Affect is not what happens when the system jams.
Solms:
It is what guides the system before the jam.
Panksepp:
It is how the organism prevents the jam.
Friston:
It is precision allocation in advance of computation.
7. The False Resolution
Thompson (gently):
We have been arguing because we each began at a different layer of the same process.
Solms:
Jaak began where feeling starts.
Friston:
I began where inference finishes.
Panksepp:
And Evan began where experience lives.
(They look at Solms.)
Solms:
I began where it hurts.
(They nod. This feels like progress. Thompson picks up chalk.)
8. The Convergence Unravels
Thompson:
So we agree. Premotion is—
Friston (simultaneously):
—precision allocation before full hierarchical inference—
Panksepp (simultaneously):
—subcortical command systems coming online—
Solms (simultaneously):
—homeostatic deviation becoming accessible to processing—
Thompson (simultaneously):
—pre-reflective bodily intentionality—
(They stop. Stare at each other.)
Friston:
We’re not saying the same thing.
Panksepp:
We’re not even speaking the same language.
Thompson:
Information geometry. Neuroanatomy. Homeostatic function. Lived experience.
Solms:
Four descriptions that can’t be translated into each other.
Friston:
And yet each seems necessary.
Panksepp:
I cannot do neuroscience with your phenomenology, Evan.
Thompson:
And I cannot do phenomenology with your Free Energy, Karl.
Solms:
But I need both to understand why it hurts.
(Long pause.)
9. Act I Closes
Friston (quietly):
We have clarified the problem.
Thompson:
We have not solved it.
Panksepp:
We have different problems.
Solms:
Or the same problem that looks different from each angle.
(Thompson writes on the board:)
Premotion =
precision allocation (KF)
subcortical command (JP)
homeostatic signal (MS)
bodily intentionality (ET)
All four, looking at the board:
We can’t proceed without each other.
All four, still looking:
We can’t translate.
(The café hums. The chalkboard holds four definitions that cannot be reduced to one.)
(No one moves.)
END OF ACT I
Act II: The Bottleneck Realization
1. Enter Frijda
(The door opens. NICO FRIJDA enters, looks at the board, orders coffee.)
Frijda:
You’re stuck.
Thompson:
We have incommensurable frameworks.
Frijda:
No. You have incommensurable WORDS for the same constraint.
(He taps the original BASH on the chalkboard.)
Frijda:
This says: high-dimensional bulk, low-dimensional boundary. A bottleneck.
Friston:
Yes. That’s what we’ve been—
Frijda:
And you all rejected it because you said affect happens BEFORE the bottleneck.
Panksepp:
It does.
Frijda:
Before WHICH bottleneck?
(Pause.)
2. The Question Lands
Solms:
What do you mean “which bottleneck?”
Frijda:
Your brainstem has a bottleneck. Body to brain. Many internal states, limited afferent pathways.
Panksepp (slowly):
Yes…
Frijda:
Your organism has a bottleneck. Internal complexity, limited sensory-motor boundary.
Thompson:
The Markov blanket.
Frijda:
Your narrative self has a bottleneck. Complex felt experience, limited language.
Friston:
BASH at multiple scales.
Frijda:
So when you say “affect happens before the bottleneck,” which one are you talking about?
3. The Scales Separate
Panksepp:
I’m talking about the body-to-brainstem bottleneck. Affect is there.
Solms:
I’m talking about the organism-to-world bottleneck. Homeostatic signals hitting sensory boundaries.
Thompson:
I’m talking about the pre-reflective-to-reflective bottleneck. Lived experience before articulation.
Friston:
And I’m talking about all of them. Each is a BASH configuration.
Frijda:
So BASH isn’t wrong. You’re each describing different cuts through the same layered system.
4. The Atom Returns
Frijda:
Let me make this simpler. Does an atom have affect?
Thompson:
No.
Frijda:
Why not?
Thompson:
Because it doesn’t feel anything.
Frijda:
But it’s inclined. Electromagnetic attraction inclines it toward other atoms.
Panksepp:
That’s not affect. That’s physics.
Frijda:
What’s the difference?
Solms:
Affect requires… what? A nervous system? Homeostasis? Experience?
Friston:
Or perhaps affect IS inclination, and what changes across scales is what kind of bottleneck the inclination encounters.
5. The Layers Stack
Frijda (drawing on a napkin):
Atom → inclined by forces → no bottleneck experience
Bacterium → inclined by gradients → chemotaxis bottleneck
Brainstem → inclined by signals → subcortical bottleneck
Organism → inclined by world → Markov blanket bottleneck
Human → inclined by meaning → narrative bottleneck
Frijda:
Each level has inclination meeting constraint. Each is BASH. What changes is the complexity of what’s being constrained.
Thompson:
So affect isn’t a thing that appears at one level.
Solms:
It’s a property of any system with dimensional mismatch.
Panksepp:
But only some levels FEEL the bottleneck.
Friston:
That’s the question. Not “where is affect” but “where does bottleneck tension become experience?”
6. The BASH Reframing
Frijda:
BASH says: affect is the Lagrange multiplier on a constrained cut.
Thompson:
In English?
Friston:
It’s the dual variable that measures how much you want to push through a boundary that won’t let you.
Solms:
The tension at the edge.
Panksepp:
But that happens at my subcortical level AND at your global workspace level.
Frijda:
Exactly. BASH describes a pattern, not a place.
7. The Realization
Thompson:
So when I said “premotion is pre-reflective bodily intentionality”…
Frijda:
You were describing the bottleneck between lived experience and reflective thought.
Panksepp:
And when I said “premotion is subcortical command”…
Frijda:
You were describing the bottleneck between body state and neural integration.
Friston:
And we were all right. We were just pointing at different bottlenecks in the same nested architecture.
Solms:
BASH doesn’t choose which bottleneck matters. It says they all matter.
8. The New Question
Frijda:
You thought you were arguing about what affect IS.
Thompson:
But we were arguing about which bottleneck we were attending to.
Friston:
And whether BASH describes the origin or the reportability of affect.
Frijda:
It describes neither. It describes the STRUCTURE. Wherever you have high-dimensional inclination meeting low-dimensional coupling, you have BASH.
Panksepp:
Then the question is: what makes BASH at the narrative level feel different from BASH at the brainstem level?
Solms:
Or BASH at the organism level feel different from BASH at the atomic level?
Thompson:
What transforms bottleneck tension into felt experience?
(They all look at each other.)
9. Act II Closes
Friston:
We can’t answer that.
Frijda:
No. But now you’re asking the right question.
(Frijda erases the four definitions of “premotion” and writes:)
BASH exists at every scale.
What changes is whether the system knows it’s constrained.
Thompson:
Atoms don’t know.
Panksepp:
Brainstems might.
Solms:
Organisms definitely do.
Friston:
And narrative selves can talk about it.
Frijda:
Which is why you’re here. Arguing about the very bottleneck you’re experiencing right now.
(They look at him.)
Frijda:
You want to fit complex, multi-layered understanding through the low-dimensional channel of conversation. That tension you feel?
(He taps the board.)
Frijda:
BASH.
(Silence. They stare at the tablecloth, the board, each other.)
END OF ACT II
Act III: The Unwilling Convergence
1. The Shape Problem
(They’re all drawing. Napkins everywhere.)
Friston (frustrated):
It can’t be linear. If every level bottlenecks to one channel, the whole system collapses.
Thompson:
Multiple pathways. It has to branch.
Solms:
Like the nervous system does. Parallel processing at every level.
Panksepp:
Triangular. Not a stack. A tree.
(They all stop drawing. Look at each other’s napkins.)
Friston:
We’ve all drawn the same shape.
2. The Recognition Begins
Thompson:
Each BASH connects to multiple other BASHes.
Solms:
The bulk of one level feeds several boundaries at the next.
Panksepp:
That’s how the brainstem works. Multiple ascending pathways. Redundancy.
Friston:
That’s how any hierarchical system works. Otherwise information loss at one bottleneck kills the whole organism.
Frijda (quietly):
So not BASH. Plural.
Thompson:
A hierarchy of BASHes.
3. The Word Forms
Solms:
Hierarchical… Adaptive…
Friston:
Each level has CASH. History-shaped edge weights.
Panksepp:
Multiple hystereses. Not one.
Thompson:
Hierarchical Adaptive System… Hystereses.
(They all stop. Stare at what Thompson just said.)
Friston (slowly):
HASH.
Solms:
Oh no.
Panksepp:
That’s worse than BASH.
Thompson:
And completely accurate.
Frijda:
Write it.
4. Resistance
Friston (not writing):
It’s too… comprehensive.
Thompson:
It makes every biological system a HASH.
Panksepp:
Every nervous system.
Solms:
Every organism.
Friston:
Every… hierarchy with constrained coupling and adaptive edges.
(Long pause.)
Panksepp:
That’s everything.
5. The Implications Arrive
Friston (getting animated):
Molecules to cells.
Solms:
Cells to tissues.
Friston:
Tissues to organs. Organs to systems. Systems to organisms!
Thompson:
Karl—
Friston:
Organisms to societies! It’s the same structure at every—
Panksepp:
Stop.
(Friston stops.)
Panksepp:
You’re doing it again.
Friston:
Doing what?
Thompson:
Finding one pattern and claiming it explains everything.
Solms:
Just because nervous systems are HASH doesn’t mean chemistry is.
Friston:
But the mathematical structure—
Panksepp:
Is the same as what? Flow networks? Hierarchies? Those are everywhere. That doesn’t make them all HASH.
Thompson:
Maybe HASH only applies to systems that adapt. That have hysteresis.
Friston (quieter):
Which is… most complex systems.
Solms:
Or maybe you’ve found a description so general it fits everything and therefore explains nothing.
(Long pause. This lands.)
6. The Unwilling Convergence
Panksepp:
My subcortical command systems are one level in the HASH.
Solms:
My homeostatic signals are another.
Thompson:
My lived experience is another.
Friston:
My hierarchical inference is another.
(They look at the napkins again. Same triangular structure on each one.)
Thompson (reluctantly):
We were each describing one layer.
Solms:
And the bottlenecks between layers.
Panksepp:
Which is why we couldn’t translate.
Friston:
You can’t reduce one level’s hysteresis to another level’s hysteresis.
7. The Structure Speaks
Frijda:
The incommensurability wasn’t a problem.
Thompson:
It was the signature of the architecture.
Solms:
If we could translate, we’d be describing the same level.
Panksepp:
The fact that we can’t means we’re at different levels in the HASH.
Friston (very quietly):
We weren’t wrong. We were just… located.
8. The Final Resistance
Thompson:
So is HASH everywhere or just… a way of talking?
Friston:
Chemistry has hierarchical structure. Adaptive edge weights.
Panksepp:
So does a filing cabinet.
Solms:
So does bureaucracy.
Thompson:
The question is: does calling it HASH add anything, or are we just renaming “hierarchy”?
Frijda (who has been quiet):
You’re asking the wrong question.
(They look at him.)
Frijda:
You didn’t invent HASH. You noticed it. The question isn’t whether it’s everywhere. The question is whether seeing it this way helps.
Friston:
Helps with what?
Frijda:
With being the kind of system that needs to understand what it is.
(Pause. No one knows what to do with that.)
9. The Acceptance
(Long silence. No one wants to write it on the board. Finally, Friston stands.)
Friston (at the chalkboard):
Hierarchical Adaptive System Hystereses.
(He writes it. Steps back. They all stare at it.)
Panksepp:
I hate that it works.
Thompson:
I hate that it’s everywhere.
Solms:
I hate that we can’t escape it.
Friston:
I hate that it explains affect, consciousness, and chemistry with the same structure.
Frijda (sipping coffee):
You’ll get used to it.
10. Finding Their Place
Thompson:
So where does consciousness happen in the HASH?
Friston:
It doesn’t “happen” at one level.
Panksepp:
It’s there at the subcortical level. Primitive affect.
Solms:
It’s there at the homeostatic level. Valenced experience.
Thompson:
It’s there at the phenomenological level. Lived presence.
Friston:
It’s there at the narrative level. Reportable selfhood.
Frijda:
It’s not at one level. It’s the whole HASH knowing it’s constrained.
11. The Quiet Recognition
Solms (quietly):
We each needed the others because we were describing different levels of the same architecture.
Panksepp:
I can’t do your level. You can’t do mine.
Thompson:
But the organism does all of them.
Friston:
Simultaneously. In parallel. Through multiple pathways.
(They look at the board. HASH is written there. Under it, someone—maybe Frijda—has added:)
None of you were wrong.
You just needed to find your place.
12. Curtain
Thompson:
So this whole conversation…
Solms:
Was us experiencing one BASH—high-dimensional understanding trying to fit through the bottleneck of conversation—
Panksepp:
While theorizing about HASH—
Friston:
Which describes the very structure we were enacting.
(They all sit back. The café sounds resume. Coffee cups. Quiet conversation. The universe proceeding.)
Frijda (standing to leave):
You’ll spend years trying to prove it’s not this simple.
(He walks out.)
(The four sit there. The chalkboard reads:)
HASH: Hierarchical Adaptive System Hystereses
Atoms → Molecules → Cells → Tissues → Organs → Organisms → …
Each level: BASH
Each connection: triangular
Each weight: history
(Below that, in smaller writing, maybe in Frijda’s handwriting, maybe not:)
Or: how to describe everything and explain nothing.
(They stare at it. No one moves to erase it. No one moves to defend it.)
Thompson (very quietly):
We can’t un-see this.
Friston:
No.
(Silence.)
(Blackout.)
END
Appendix I: Emotion as a BASH Tree
The Structure
If HASH describes hierarchical systems generally, then a single emotion is itself a HASH—multiple BASH layers, triangularly arranged, each with its own history-shaped edge weights.
Not a linear cascade from body to brain to thought.
A branching architecture where each level connects to multiple pathways at the next.
The Layers (Provisional)
Level 1: Physiological Perturbation
Bulk: Metabolic state, hormonal cascades, visceral changes
Boundary: Afferent nerve pathways, baroreceptors, interoceptive signals
Bottleneck: Limited bandwidth from body to brainstem
This is not yet emotion. It is the high-dimensional internal state change that will become available to emotional processing.
Level 2: Subcortical Affect (Panksepp’s layer)
Bulk: Distributed subcortical command systems (SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, PANIC, etc.)
Boundary: Thalamic relays, ascending pathways
Bottleneck: Command signals constrained through specific projection systems
Multiple parallel pathways. Not one “emotion center” but distributed systems with overlapping outputs.
Level 3: Homeostatic Valence (Solms’ layer)
Bulk: Integrated body-brain state assessment
Boundary: Cortical access points, salience signals
Bottleneck: Valenced experience (“this is good/bad for me”) emerges at this constraint
This is where the organism knows whether things are going well or badly. Pre-linguistic, but already evaluative.
Level 4: Pre-reflective Feeling (Thompson’s layer)
Bulk: Lived bodily orientation, pre-thematic situatedness
Boundary: Phenomenal field, attention, pre-reflective awareness
Bottleneck: Felt tendency without explicit categorization
You are already afraid before you think “I am afraid.” This layer is that pre-reflective inclination.
Level 5: Named Emotion (Narrative layer)
Bulk: Integrated feeling state with context, history, meaning
Boundary: Language, conceptual categories, cultural scripts
Bottleneck: Rich phenomenology compressed into words like “anxiety,” “joy,” “shame”
This is where Friston’s global workspace sits. Where emotion becomes reportable, shareable, narratable.
Level 6: Social/Relational Emotion (if we continue)
Bulk: Personal emotional experience
Boundary: Interpersonal expression, cultural norms
Bottleneck: Internal complexity meeting social legibility
What you feel vs. what you can show. Another BASH.
Why Triangular
If this were linear, every emotion would bottleneck through the narrowest channel and emerge identical.
But emotions preserve complexity because:
- Level 2 connects to Level 3 through multiple subcortical-cortical pathways
- Level 3 connects to Level 4 through multiple modes of awareness
- Level 4 connects to Level 5 through multiple linguistic/conceptual framings
The triangle preserves dimensional richness while creating hierarchical integration.
Why It Matters
This explains why:
Emotion resists reduction: You can’t translate Level 2 (subcortical) cleanly into Level 5 (language). Information is genuinely lost at each bottleneck, and genuinely added by each level’s processing.
Emotion feels conflicted: Multiple systems at Level 2 push incompatible signals toward Level 3. The constraint creates tension. That tension IS part of the affect.
Talking about emotion changes it: Routing through Level 5 (language) alters the edge weights. The HASH is adaptive. Narrating fear changes the fear.
Regulation works at different levels:
- Breathing targets Level 1-2 bottleneck
- Cognitive reappraisal targets Level 4-5 bottleneck
- Therapy targets the whole HASH architecture
The Unsettling Implication
If emotion is a BASH tree, then:
“What you feel” is not a thing at any one level.
It is the entire triangular structure, simultaneously active, with tension at multiple bottlenecks, each bottleneck creating its own phenomenology, none reducible to the others.
Which is why the four frameworks in the café couldn’t translate.
They were each describing one bottleneck in the tree.
Or
It’s just a redescription of “emotions have multiple levels” using fancier graph theory.
The play ended on that ambiguity intentionally.
This appendix doesn’t resolve it.
Appendix II: The Upside of Incommensurability
The Problem as Feature
In Act I, the four characters converge on “premotion” only to discover they each mean something completely different:
- Precision allocation (Friston)
- Subcortical command (Panksepp)
- Homeostatic signal (Solms)
- Bodily intentionality (Thompson)
This looks like failure. Four smart people who can’t agree on basic terms.
But what if the inability to translate is not a bug but a diagnostic?
What Incommensurability Reveals
If HASH describes a hierarchical system where each level has its own BASH (bulk-boundary bottleneck), then:
The frameworks are incommensurable BECAUSE they describe different levels.
Friston describes Level 5 (narrative/inference).
Thompson describes Level 4 (pre-reflective phenomenology).
Solms describes Level 3 (homeostatic valence).
Panksepp describes Level 2 (subcortical commands).
You cannot reduce Level 2 language to Level 5 language without losing what Level 2 is doing. The bottleneck between them is real. Information is genuinely constrained.
Incommensurability is the signature of genuine hierarchy.
Why Reduction Fails
Imagine they could translate perfectly. Suppose Panksepp’s subcortical language mapped cleanly onto Friston’s inference language.
That would mean there’s no bottleneck between those levels.
Which would mean no dimensional reduction.
Which would mean the system collapses to one dimension.
A system where every level translates perfectly into every other level is not hierarchical—it’s flat.
Perfect translation would prove HASH wrong.
The fact that they can’t translate proves the architecture has real structural constraints at each transition.
The Epistemic Triangle
In Act III, they discover the system must be triangularly arranged—multiple pathways at each level—to preserve complexity.
The same is true epistemologically.
If you only had Friston’s framework:
You’d think affect is precision-weighted prediction error. Full stop.
You’d miss that there’s already affective processing happening subcortically before any precision weighting occurs.
If you only had Panksepp’s framework:
You’d think affect is subcortical command activation. Full stop.
You’d miss that affect also exists at the phenomenological and narrative levels.
You need all four perspectives because the system operates at all four levels simultaneously.
And you need them to be mutually irreducible, or you’d collapse the hierarchy.
What This Explains
1. Why interdisciplinary work is hard
Not because people are stubborn, but because they’re describing different levels of the same HASH. The translation difficulty is structural.
2. Why “levels of explanation” debates never resolve
Neuroscience vs. psychology vs. phenomenology aren’t competing—they’re at different levels in the HASH. Asking “which is fundamental” is like asking “which BASH in the stack is real?”
All of them. That’s the point.
3. Why affect feels complex
Because it IS happening at multiple levels, each with its own processing, each constrained at its own bottleneck. The experience of “what I feel” is the entire HASH, not one layer.
4. Why talking about emotions changes them
Language routes through Level 5 (narrative). Accessing that level alters the edge weights—CASH is adaptive. The very act of reporting emotion reshapes the HASH.
The Upside
The incommensurability is not a problem to solve.
It is evidence that:
- The hierarchy is real
- The bottlenecks are real
- Each level does irreducible work
- The system preserves complexity across scales
If the frameworks translated easily, you’d know you were describing something simple.
The fact that they don’t—that Thompson genuinely cannot do neuroscience with phenomenology, and Panksepp genuinely cannot do anatomy with inference—means they’re describing something with real hierarchical structure.
The Danger
Of course, you could also just be confused.
Four people talking past each other because they’re using terms loosely, or because the domain is genuinely messy and pre-paradigmatic, or because HASH is sophisticated-sounding nonsense.
The play ends without resolving this.
But if HASH is real, the incommensurability is the best evidence for it.
One-Sentence Takeaway
The inability to translate frameworks across levels is not a failure of communication—it is proof that the levels are doing different work under real constraints.
Appendix III: Affect Expects Answer
The Incomplete State
Affect is not a report.
When you feel anxious, the anxiety is not telling you “there is threat.” It is asking: “What should be done?”
The bottleneck tension in BASH is not informational. It is interrogative.
The Structure of the Question
Recall BASH: high-dimensional bulk trying to route through low-dimensional boundary.
The bulk contains multiple incompatible configurations:
- Flee
- Fight
- Freeze
- Appease
- Ignore
The boundary cannot carry them all simultaneously.
The constraint poses a question: which configuration?
Affect is what that question feels like from the inside.
Why Affect Persists
Affect does not dissipate by being noticed or understood.
It dissipates when answered.
The answer can be:
- Action – selecting one pathway, committing resources
- Decision – adopting a configuration, collapsing ambiguity
- Adaptation – reshaping edge weights so the question no longer arises
- Regulation – acknowledging the question without forcing premature answer
But something must happen at the bottleneck.
Unresolved affect is an unanswered question still being asked.
What Counts as Answer
Not every response resolves the tension.
Rumination asks the same question repeatedly without answering. The bottleneck remains constrained. Affect persists.
Suppression ignores the question. The bulk is still trying to push through. Affect intensifies.
Distraction temporarily shifts to a different BASH. The question is deferred, not answered.
Answering means: the system adopts a configuration that resolves the incompatibility at that bottleneck.
This can happen through:
- Behavioral commitment (action readiness → action)
- Cognitive reappraisal (reframing what the bulk is pushing for)
- Somatic regulation (changing the bulk’s state directly)
- Relational attunement (boundary widening through connection)
Why Naming Helps (Sometimes)
When you name an emotion—“I am afraid”—you are routing the question through Level 5 (language/narrative).
This forces a dimensional reduction. The high-dimensional affective state collapses into a category.
For some questions, this is answer enough. The system can proceed.
For others, naming is just another way of asking the question in different words. The bottleneck remains.
The HASH Perspective
In HASH, there are questions at every level:
Level 2 (subcortical): Which command system should activate?
Level 3 (homeostatic): Approach or avoid?
Level 4 (phenomenological): How should I orient?
Level 5 (narrative): What does this mean about who I am?
Each is a bottleneck asking for resolution.
Affect cascades: when one level answers, it poses new questions at adjacent levels.
You decide to flee (Level 2 answer) → but now Level 5 asks “am I a coward?” → new affect.
Therapy as Answering Architecture
Different therapeutic approaches target different levels:
- Somatic work: Answers at Level 1-2 (body state, visceral regulation)
- Emotion-focused therapy: Answers at Level 3-4 (validating affect, completing action tendencies)
- CBT: Answers at Level 4-5 (reframing questions, changing conceptual bottlenecks)
- Psychodynamic therapy: Answers by revealing why the same questions keep being asked (CASH – historical edge weights)
They’re not competing. They’re answering at different levels of the HASH.
The Penrose Echo
In v12, there was an appendix suggesting affective decisions resemble Objective Reduction—incompatible geometries forced to resolve.
Here’s the simpler version:
Affect is what it feels like when a system must collapse from multiple possible configurations to one actual configuration.
The question is: which one?
The collapse is: the answer.
Why Some Affect Never Resolves
Some questions have no good answer.
The bulk is demanding incompatible things. The boundary cannot accommodate them. No configuration resolves the tension without creating new tension.
Chronic anxiety: the question keeps being posed because the system cannot find a stable answer.
Trauma: the question was posed under conditions where no answer was possible. The system loops.
Existential affect: some bottlenecks are structural. Being a finite system in an uncertain world means some questions have no resolution.
The Quiet Claim
If affect is question, then:
Consciousness is not passive awareness.
It is the system asking itself what to do.
And waiting—sometimes forever—for answer.
Or
Maybe affect is just arousal + valence + appraisal, and calling it a “question” is poetic license.
The play doesn’t settle this.
Neither does this appendix.
One-Sentence Takeaway
Affect is the felt experience of a bottleneck awaiting resolution—it persists not because you haven’t understood it, but because you haven’t answered it.
Radical Centrism 