*First-person aspect on the being's own conditions.* Feeling is what the being's self-producing recursion — the ongoing activity by which it produces the conditions of its own continuation — looks like to it from inside, not commentary on those conditions from a separate cognitive layer. Any account must locate affect at the first-person aspect of the being's situation rather than as a description of that situation by some other faculty. The structural requirement is that the account preserve the constitutive nature of the first-person aspect: feeling is not *about* the being; it is what the being's running consists in from its own angle.

*Valence, salience, and urgency as constitutive.* Affect has structure: it is valenced (good or bad, attractive or aversive), salient (this matters, that does not), and urgent (now, not later). Any account must explain why registration has this structure rather than being neutral content. The structural requirement is that the account derive valence, salience, and urgency from what a dissipative current's self-tracking consists in. A dissipative current is a persisting being that maintains its organization by drawing on and dissipating energy. Because its continuation depends on certain conditions, it registers those conditions with the structure that makes their relevance immediate.

*Priority of affect to reasoning without subordination.* Affect is structurally prior to reasoning (a being that registers nothing valenced has nothing to deliberate about) but not subordinate to it. Reasoning operates on what affect delivers, and the operations of reasoning feed back into the affective registration. Any account must accommodate this asymmetric but mutually constitutive relation. The structural requirement is that the account distinguish *priority* (affect supplies what reasoning operates on) from *subordination* (reasoning ranking lower than affect), they are neither equal nor hierarchical but recursively dependent.

*Continuity with bodily and biological state.* Damasio's somatic-marker tradition correctly observes that affect is continuous with bodily state; the patients who cannot decide are those whose affective signaling from the body is damaged. Any account must connect feeling to bodily condition rather than treating affect as disembodied mental content. The structural requirement is that the account locate affect at the first-person aspect on the body's own running, with somatic state as the substrate the first-person aspect registers.

*Architectural primary systems plus conceptual elaboration.* Both the basic-emotion tradition (architectural primary systems at the substrate level) and the constructionist tradition (conceptual elaboration of core affect) pick up something real. Any account must explain how both layers operate without reducing one to the other. The structural requirement is that the account treat primary systems as the architecturally distinct registrations the substrate supports, with conceptual elaboration as what deeper recursion does to those registrations at the depth where concepts apply.

*Depth-graded distribution across lineages.* Affect runs at shallow depths in invertebrates registering noxious conditions, at deeper depths in fish and amphibians, at deeper depths still in mammals registering social and motivational valence, and at the deepest depths in self-aware beings whose recursion can take their own affect as an object. Any account must accommodate the gradient rather than drawing a categorical line at any species-level threshold. The structural requirement is that the account distinguish what runs at each depth, with the same registration-of-condition activity progressively elaborated at deeper recursive depths.

*The cognitive-emotion debate.* Animal cognition shows complex affective behavior: grief in elephants and cetaceans, joy in primate and avian play, fear and attachment in mammals. Any account must accommodate these phenomena without either anthropomorphizing them (over-attributing the human conceptual layer) or eliminating them (denying the first-person aspect at the depth the architecture supports). The structural requirement is that the account distinguish the constitutive registration from the conceptual elaboration, with the registration present wherever the recursion runs at the relevant depth and the conceptual layer requiring deeper recursion.

*Feeling and the foundation of moral practice.* The moral significance of harm depends on harm registering from inside as what it is to be the being undergoing it ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)). Any account of feeling must support the moral-philosophical work the framework's ethics builds on top of it. The structural requirement is that affect be located precisely enough to anchor the readability of suffering and flourishing across beings the morality account requires.

Taken together these requirements describe the explanatory program the framework [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) defends: a first-person aspect, valence, salience, urgency, bodily continuity, architectural and conceptual layers, depth-graded distribution, and moral significance. They are not neutral criteria every adequate theory of feeling must accept. In particular, the existence and distribution of a first-person aspect across lineages, and the proposed connection from affect to moral standing, remain contested philosophical and empirical questions. The framework argues for this package rather than treating it as established by affective science.


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← [8.2.1 What is Disputed](<8.2.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [8.2.3 What is Predicted](<8.2.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
