The framework proposes that willing involves a system capable of representing alternatives, constraints, and anticipated consequences before action. In humans and other animals, neural systems are relevant to this work, but the relation between neural architecture, conscious access, and agency remains actively debated. The following are hypotheses generated by the framework, not a specific cognitive architecture established wherever willing occurs.

*A note on scope.* The empirical sketches that follow — the brain as modal-modeling network, modular sensory architecture, the subconscious as accumulated modal terrain — are offered as structural identifications consistent with cognitive-neuroscience practice, not as load-bearing empirical premises of the structural argument. The load-bearing claim is the modal architecture itself; the empirical realizations name what that architecture looks like in the human case. Wherever willing occurs in other substrates, the same structural features must obtain, though their implementation will differ.

*The brain as modal-modeling network.* The brain is the organism's modal-modeling network. It does not merely represent what is actual. It models actuality as possibility-space: what can happen from here, what cannot happen from here, what must happen for another state to obtain, what blocks a line, what opens a line, what threatens continuation, what enables it, and which response-pathways remain available. At reflective depth that map can take propositional form: *if I do this, that may follow; if that follows, this future closes; if I wait, another line may open.* Beneath reflective depth the same operation is embodied, affective, spatial, temporal, and procedural. The organism maps condition, response, consequence, and constraint before it names any of them.

*Three modal dimensions of the map.* The map is structured by the same Triconditions that organize Nature itself (Time, Space, and Substance: T, S, and Φ). Temporal modal mapping registers sequence, delay, what must come before what, what is ripening, what is closing. Spatial modal mapping registers distinction, reach, separation, what blocks passage, what opens onto what. Substantial modal mapping registers persistence, identity, capacity, what holds together under change, what a thing can and cannot do given what it is. The dimensions are not chosen by the brain; they are the modal dimensions a living current must map to act at all.

*Modularity.* That modeling is modular. A subject does not build one undifferentiated map of everything at once. The work is distributed across specialized modules that map regions of possibility-space at different scales and through different channels. Each sense is a modal-mapping module rather than a passive sensor. Vision builds a navigable visual possibility-space rather than recording pixels — what is present, what is reachable, what blocks what, what is likely to move next, what is hidden but inferable. Hearing builds a directional, source-attributing acoustic possibility-space. Proprioception builds a possibility-space of available bodily motion. Memory, language, social recognition, threat-detection, and future-simulation are likewise modular: each maps a kind of modal structure the organism must navigate. Will and reasoning operate on the integrated field these modules produce, which is why damage to a module does not merely subtract data; it subtracts a region of livable possibility from the subject's world.

*Concepts, language, technology, institutions.* Concepts are portable modules of this kind. A concept like *door* is not a label for an image. It is a stable modal map: passable when open, blocking when closed, separating inside from outside, available through handle or push or key, changing what lines are live. Language ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)) is the sharing of such modules between agents. Technology ([§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)) is their externalization into the world. Institutions are modules for coordinating recurring modal problems across many subjects at once. Each is a structural extension of the same predicted architecture beyond the boundaries of any single brain.

*The subconscious as accumulated modal terrain.* The subconscious is the accumulated modal network operating beneath reflective attention. It is not a hidden second self but the stored terrain of prior condition-response-consequence pairings: habit, skill, aversion, trauma response, bodily anticipation, social recognition, procedural memory. Autopilot is not irrational in itself. It is the map running where the system does not reopen the whole field. Beneath even this stored terrain lies a faster layer that does not run through the field at all: the withdrawal of a hand from a hot surface is run by a protective reflex arc that fires before the field is consulted and before the act could be selected or refused, so that the body executes it *for* the current rather than through it. Such a movement is not a shallow exercise of will but the absence of will — directed, adaptive, and wholly involuntary, which is why it is felt as something that happened rather than something done. Will begins above both layers, where the current can delay, inspect, inhibit, or redirect the stored line before it becomes action — predicting a specific functional architecture in which prefrontal inhibition, working-memory holding, and conscious access selectively reopen subconscious channels for revision.

*Depth gradient across lineages.* The framework predicts that richer capacities for foresight, delay, learned revision, and counterfactual reasoning may correlate with more complex integrative cognitive systems. This is a graded hypothesis about agency, not a settled cross-species measure of free will or responsibility. The empirical record can inform this model but does not uniquely establish its three-axis architecture, modular theory, or account of conscious and subconscious control.


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← [8.9.2 What is Required](<8.9.2 What is Required.md>) | [8.9.4 What is Confirmed](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
