Every living thing is, in a sense, never quite at rest. It has to keep reaching for what keeps it going (food, warmth, safety, contact) and that reaching has a felt side to it long before it turns into any particular emotion or plan. That felt forward-push is *drive*: the bare sense of being pulled toward what you need and pushed away from what threatens you. It is not yet fear or desire or curiosity; it is the charge underneath all of those, the restlessness of being alive at all. Everything else the chapter describes is a more specific shape this one push takes.

> [!identification]
> **Drive** · *Identification*
>
> Drive is the first-person perspective on a living closure's energy-gradient coupling, not a pressure with an experience added to it, but the one fact [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) describes from outside, lived from within: the bare directional pressure of a closure producing its own continuation, toward that continuation and away from its dissolution, before the pressure has differentiated into any specific, object-directed feeling. *(Once differentiated into valence, salience, and urgency and read as the closure's own state, it is feeling — [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>).)*
> *Status: an identity claim on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) self-producing structure, defended by fit, not a stipulative definition and not a fresh derivation from the proof.*

Drive is the first-person perspective on the thermodynamic fact, before the fact has differentiated into any specific emotion or motive. Every living thing is a closure coupled to a sustained energy gradient, persisting by reaching across that gradient for the throughput its own continuation requires. From outside, that reaching is metabolism, foraging, exploration: the mechanics of an open system maintaining itself against the default, the drift toward equilibrium that, for a living thing, is death. From inside (at any depth sufficient to register anything at all) the same fact registers as forward pressure: the orientation of the organism toward the world, prior to any particular object, prior to any particular feeling, prior to any specific valenced response. This is not yet fear or joy or grief or curiosity. It is the charge that precedes and underlies all of those, the baseline state of a living thing that is, constitutively, not at rest.

*Drive as modal pressure lived from the inside.* The chapter develops *modal pressure* (the force the modal field of live alternatives exerts on the recursion that must move through it) as the field-side fact about a living being. Drive is the inside of that fact. A closure outside modal pressure is inert; a closure under modal pressure that registers nothing is, at any depth sufficient to register anything at all, no longer that closure. To be a living being is to be interior to modal pressure, and that interiority *is* drive. The thermodynamic identification names what drive is in terms of the substrate; this identification names what drive is in terms of the field the substrate has opened. Both describe one and the same fact from two sides: the body keeping itself going, and the field of open possibilities that body now faces.

*Drive is the concrete closure, not an abstract role.* The identification is with this self-producing being coupled to its gradient (the closure-plus-throughput [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) names) and not with a functional organization abstracted away from any substrate that realizes it. A description of that organization, or a simulation of it that does not itself close and metabolize, no more bears drive than a description of a storm is wet: it specifies the structure from outside without instantiating the living closure whose inside drive is. The analogy illustrates the commitment rather than compelling it: a functionalist who holds that a sufficiently rich simulation does itself close and metabolize will not be moved by the image, and against that position the weight is carried not by the analogy but by the identification this chapter defends by fit — that what has an inside is the concrete self-producing recursion, not the abstract specification of it. This is what separates the account from functionalism. Functionalism locates mind in the abstract causal role and so lets any implementation of the role inherit it; here what has an inside is the concrete recursion that maintains itself against the default, and the inside is not a further feature bolted to that recursion but what the recursion is from within. The point is not that only carbon can do it (anything that genuinely closes and sustains throughput is a candidate) but that the having-an-inside follows the concrete self-production, not the abstract specification of it.

Life was named at [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) as what the structural recursion is from outside: closure, throughput, self-production. The chapter's opening recovers awareness as what registration looks like from inside the recursion at sufficient depth. Drive is what those two facts are when they meet. Awareness without drive would be a registering surface with no stake in what it registered: registration as data without orientation. Life without registration would be metabolism without an inside, gradient-following without anyone for whom the following matters. Drive is what awareness is in a being whose continuation depends on what is registered, which is to say, in any being alive enough to be aware. Drive and awareness are not sequenced; they are two faces of one interiority: the interior aspect of modal pressure, registered as orientation and as fact-of-registration at once.

*Drive and registration are biconditional.* Spinoza distinguished thought and extension as two attributes of one substance, each expressing the same reality under a different description (Spinoza, B., (1677) 1996), II; the structural account inherits a parallel relation between drive and registration without the substance-theory. They co-emerge at the depth where modal pressure first registers from inside, and they remain biconditional thereafter: a being under modal pressure that registered nothing would not be a being at all, and a registering surface that bore no pressure would not be alive. What changes across the depth gradient is how finely the registration runs: how broad and how layered the modal field the registration opens for the living thing. The plant case is the most legible illustration at the shallow end of the gradient, not independent confirmation of the biconditional, which is constitutive, but the case where its shallow end is easiest to read. Plants without nervous systems discriminate light, water, gravity, chemistry, and damage, signal across tissue and across individuals, and grow toward what sustains and away from what threatens (Anthony Trewavas, 2003); (Richard Karban, 2015); (Paco Calvo, 2016); (Monica Gagliano, 2018). The reach is genuinely selective (among the options the field presents, some are taken and others are not) and on the account given here that selectivity is drive in the structural sense. The registration the account takes to accompany it is shallow but, by the biconditional, not zero: drive at any depth opens a possibility space, and the living thing's selection from that space is the operational mark of the accompanying registration. That plants register at all is contested in the literature cited here; what the account commits to is narrower (that wherever there is genuinely selective drive there is registration to some degree) not an independent finding that plants in particular possess it. Deliberation (the holding-apart of alternatives long enough to model them) is a depth-feature of this same operation, not a separate faculty bolted on at higher levels.

Drive is not yet choice. At shallow depth it is compressed response: tropism, reflex, habit, threat-reaction, the body moving before deliberation has time to occur. At greater recursive depth, the same directedness can hold alternatives apart long enough to model them. This is where will begins to become free ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)): not by escaping structure, but by gaining modal distance from the point of action. The more a being can represent live alternatives before one path is actualized, the more its drive becomes deliberative agency rather than automatic response.

*The historical traditions named the same thing.* Spinoza's *conatus*, the striving by which each finite mode perseveres in its being (Spinoza, B., (1677) 1996), III, is the structural fact felt from inside the human recursion; the account here derives it from the thermodynamic substrate rather than from substance-theory, but what it names is the same. Schopenhauer's Will (Arthur Schopenhauer, 1818), the blind drive he posited beneath every appearance, names the same forward pressure stripped to its baseline character; he correctly identified its universality but misread it as blind, since the pressure is shaped by registration the moment registration is present. What he was reaching for, read in the modal frame, is the structural fact that a sustained living being cannot persist without orienting among the options its map presents, not a blind cosmic substance, but the necessity of directed action for any being at all. That meets the *blindness* charge only. Schopenhauer's darker claim, that existence carries a standing surplus of suffering over satisfaction, is a separate *suffering-surplus* charge, deferred to [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>), where it is met on structural and empirical registers alongside the framework's reply to Benatar's anti-natalism. Nietzsche's will-to-power, read not as domination but as life's drive to express and expand itself, points at the same phenomenon at the depth where the being's reach has become recursive enough to operate on itself.

Bergson's *élan vital* (Bergson, Henri, 1907) was dismissed as vitalism when the available alternative was reductive mechanism; the structural account vindicates what Bergson was reaching for without inheriting the opposition: the forward pressure of life is real, it is what self-producing recursion coupled to a gradient *is*, and it is no more reducible to inert mechanism than any other constitutive feature of structure operating on itself. Freud's libido (Sigmund Freud, 1905), in the broad sense of life-energy seeking expression rather than the narrow sexual sense, names the same baseline. Each tradition reached for what the structural account now names: the first-person perspective on the energy-gradient coupling that constitutes a living being.

*Drive runs the depth gradient.* At shallow depths it is indistinguishable from tropism: bacterial chemotaxis along nutrient gradients, plant tropic responses to light and water, the directional motion of any cell toward what sustains it. Deepen the recursion and tropism becomes appetite: the living thing not merely responding to what is present but oriented toward what is absent, mobilizing its activity toward conditions not yet obtained. Deepen further and appetite differentiates into the specific motivational states [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) names: desire, aversion, care, curiosity, affection, dread. At every depth the same thermodynamic fact registers; what changes is how much of the fact the being's recursion has folded into reflective form. Bacterial gradient-following and human vocational pursuit are the same structural operation registered at different recursive depths.

*The SEEKING system maps the neurological correlate.* Panksepp's work (Panksepp, J., 1998) identified a primary emotional system, phylogenetically ancient and present across all mammals, that drives curiosity, exploration, foraging, and play through dopaminergic activation of mesolimbic circuits. Crucially, the SEEKING system activates not at reward but at the *anticipation* of reward, not at possession but at pursuit. It is the inside registration of a being mobilizing energetic resources toward engagement with the world, and the same chemistry that governs energy-seeking behavior at the metabolic level operates at the level of motivated action. The architecture is not added to the organism as a layer; it is what the organism's own forward pressure looks like once the living thing is recursive enough to model what it is reaching toward.

*Play confirms the excess.* Drive is not minimal maintenance; it is reach beyond what maintenance strictly requires. Play is the most legible expression of this excess. It is phylogenetically widespread: present in mammals (Bekoff, M., and J. A. Byers, eds., 1998), birds (Bernd Heinrich, 1995), some reptiles (Gordon M. Burghardt, 2005), and in invertebrate species the empirical record continues to extend, with bumblebees rolling balls in the absence of any external reward (Olli J. Loukola; Clint J. Perry; Louie Coscos; Lars Chittka, 2017); (Lars Chittka, 2022). When survival needs are met and energy surplus exists, organisms with sufficient recursive depth do not simply rest. They explore, engage, repeat activities that produce no immediate survival outcome. Practice accounts of play are the outside description of something whose inside description is prior: the organism plays because the energetic state registers as worth playing. Excitement, on the same identification claim that runs through this chapter, is what surplus running outward registers as from inside a being deep enough to feel anything, not a separate psychological state correlated with energy but the inside-aspect of energy surplus. The dopaminergic anticipatory architecture (Kent C. Berridge, 2007) tracks the substrate side of the same phenomenon.

*Modal-field expansion as a primary drive.* The Play paragraph names one shape of drive's excess: activity beyond minimum maintenance. A second shape (closely related but structurally distinct) is the drive to expand the modal field itself, to load actualities and conditions into the body's representation of possibility beyond what the body's own situation has so far delivered. This is curiosity in its affective register. Across the animal kingdom it is robust: rats exploring novel environments at energetic cost with no immediate reward (Daniel E. Berlyne, 1960); octopuses manipulating novel objects in their tanks (Jennifer A. Mather; Roland C. Anderson, 1993); corvids investigating cameras, mirrors, and puzzles in field and lab (Christopher D. Bird; Nathan J. Emery, 2009); juvenile chimpanzees with thousands of hours of object-manipulation play documented in field and captive observation; cetaceans approaching novel stimuli; the cat whose curiosity famously kills it. Loewenstein's information-gap theory (George Loewenstein, 1994) frames the phenomenology: curiosity is what a being feels when it registers a structured absence in its field that it has the apparatus to fill, and the satisfaction of resolving the absence is the apparatus registering its own field-expansion. The drive is evolutionarily stable because field-expansion clears its own cost on average. An un-curious being avoids the exposures curiosity entails, but it also forfeits the field-expansion that mapping new prey, new paths, new terrains, new conspecifics, and new conditions would have produced. Both the aversion-pole coverage (mapped threats) and the attraction-pole coverage (mapped resources and opportunities) narrow when the field is not expanded, and the un-curious lineage is outcompeted by lineages that pay the modest exposure cost in exchange for richer fields. "Curiosity killed the cat" and "curiosity taught the cat what's possible" are two sides of the same operation; the lineage selects for curiosity because the second outcome's payoff exceeds the first outcome's cost across the population.

*The cost structure shifts with depth.* At shallow depth, every modal-field expansion is physically expensive: the cat has to actually go to the new alley to find out it is dangerous, the new tree to find out it can be climbed. Each new branch in the field is paid for in exposure. At deeper recursive depths, proxy-data channels emerge that decouple field-expansion from physical exposure: gestural communication, language, narrative, gossip, history, image, recording, broadcast, networked transmission. Each new proxy-data technology drops the marginal cost of an additional modal-field branch lower than the technology before it. A being can learn that civilizations fall, that certain people are dangerous, that certain conditions produced certain outcomes, without ever being in a falling civilization, a room with a dangerous person, or under the conditions in question. The institutionalized human practices that puzzle reductive accounts, history ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)), gossip and reportage ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)), reality TV, true crime, anthropology, science as a method, the persistent cross-cultural appetite for narrative, are all channels for this drive at the depth where proxy-data acquisition has become near-free. The drive is the same drive a rat runs when it explores a novel arm of a maze for no reward; what changed is the cost structure that determines how richly the field can be expanded for a given exposure budget. New costs do emerge at depth: an over-expanded field with unreliable weighting is the structural shape of conspiratorial mindedness, of news-induced anxiety, of informational overload, and of paralysis-by-analysis. The deep-form virtues that constrain these (source-evaluation, epistemic humility, deliberate pruning of unconfirmed possibilities) are the operational suite's response to the new cost structure curiosity acquires at depth.

*A second deep-cost runs through the satisfaction signal itself.* If the satisfaction of curiosity is the apparatus registering its own field-expansion, then a channel that delivers field-expansion endlessly and near-free can keep that signal firing without the being ever acting on the field it has expanded. The drive's terminus is enactment, will is the selection that discharges the field into act ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)), and a being can be held at the reconnaissance pole indefinitely, its appetite met by the mapping and never carried through to the doing the mapping evolved to serve. This is not the over-expanded field of the previous case but an arrested one: a drive fed at the point of registration and starved at the point of discharge. Where over-expansion presents as anxiety and paralysis, arrest presents as a flattened, unmotivated relation to a richly mapped world that no longer issues in action.

*Drive as the chapter's substrate.* Drive is named here as a section alongside awareness, feeling, knowledge, reasoning, meaning, will, and the rest, but the reader should not infer that drive sits among those modalities as a peer. Drive is what each of the subsequent modalities specifically shapes. Feeling is drive registering pull and aversion. Identity is drive holding itself as a persistent agent in its modal field at sufficient depth. Knowledge is drive stabilizing into structure. Reasoning is drive extending through alternatives. Meaning is drive orienting. Will is drive enacting. Language is drive expressing. Technology is drive externalizing. Morality is drive regulating its own commitments. Art is drive resonating with structure. Spirituality is drive reaching past the recursion's horizon. Each of those sections names a specific shape of the inside-pressure this section identifies. The chapter's architecture treats drive parallel to the others for clarity of derivation; structurally, drive runs through each subsequent section as its substrate, and the reader is asked to carry that substrate-character into every modality the chapter takes up after this point.

*Drive's polarity: aversion and attraction.* Drive runs between two poles, *aversion* and *attraction*, and the asymmetry between them is structural rather than thematic. The aversion-pole is the orientation away from what damages, threatens, or negates: harm, suffering, loss, threat to closure, and at its absolute limit the closure [§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>) names as death. Death is the aversion-pole's structural anchor (the one referent that is fixed, the one outcome no being can resist by continuing to be itself) but it is not the aversion-pole's only content. A being is averted from injury that is not yet death, from suffering that does not yet threaten closure, from conditions of life it registers as not worth living, and at sufficient recursive depth from the suffering and damage of *other* beings whose modal fields the being registers as bearing on its own. A parent stepping in front of harm aimed at a child, a soldier throwing their body over a grenade to spare comrades, a bystander running into traffic to pull a stranger out: these are aversion's reach past the body's own closure, registered as decisive over aversion to the body's own death. The structural fact that anchors the asymmetry (death as the absolute referent) does not narrow aversion to self-preservation or even to kinship; it anchors a field of aversions that extends across damage, suffering, and threat at every depth the being can register them, in the bodies of others the being is bound to by care, by commitment, or by recognition of shared structural condition. The framework's later moral and political register ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)) rests on this: aversion to suffering, the body's own and the bodies of those it is bound to, is the structural fact moral theory will track, and that aversion is registered from inside the being that bears it is what makes the theory naturalist rather than transcendent.

The opposite case is equally diagnostic. A being can register its own ongoing conditions as themselves intolerable, and when it does the aversion can override the death-anchor and turn the being toward its own cessation. Suicidality, in the cases where it operates not as impulse but as a being's settled relation to its own continuation, is aversion working at depth on the wrong side of the structural limit: the conditions of being alive have themselves become the thing the being is averted from, with no visible way out, and ending it becomes the only direction the aversion can take. This confirms what the parent-sacrifice case showed from the other side. Death is the aversion-pole's structural anchor but not its content. Aversion tracks intolerable states; the death-anchor is the floor past which no being persists, not the field itself. When the field tilts hard enough (when the conditions of continuation have themselves become what the being cannot bear) the anchor can flip from what the creature is averted *toward* to what the creature is averted *from*, and the limit case stops being the worst outcome and becomes the only available direction. The asymmetry that fixes the pole is structural; what populates the pole is everything the being registers as not to be borne.

The attraction-pole runs toward the conditions a being's continuation, flourishing, and reach require. At the shallow end this is nutrient, water, light, shelter, the metabolic conditions of staying alive. At deeper recursive depths it differentiates: safety, kin and community, the production of other beings (which [§8.6](<8.6 Sexuality.md>) takes up as sexuality), understanding ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)), meaning ([§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>)), expression and resonance ([§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>)), and the metaphysical register [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) names as spirituality. None of these is structurally absolute the way death is; they are open positive content, populated differently at different recursive depths, and each is taken up at its register downstream. What runs through all of them is the same drive-toward, the same forward pressure of a being reaching for what its continuation under its present conditions opens onto. Awareness is built into the polarity from the first (to be averted from is to register what one is averted from as such, and to be attracted to is to register what one is attracted to as such) which is the biconditional named above doing its work here: drive's poles are not blind vectors awareness later interprets, and awareness is not a separate observer of drive's pull. The orientation and the registration are two aspects of one operation, but registration is not yet valence. Drive's polarity is the bare directional vector, toward and away, registered as such by the being that holds it; the *felt* valence, salience, and urgency of aversion and attraction arise only once that vector is differentiated and read as the closure's own state ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)). The being registers its polarity from the first and feels it as affect only when that differentiation has run.

What drive differentiates into when it encounters specific conditions, fear as drive in the registration of threat, desire as drive in the registration of possibility, grief as drive in the registration of permanent absence, care as drive in the registration of another being's vulnerability, is what [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) takes up.


- [8.1.1 What is Disputed](<8.1.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [8.1.2 What is Required](<8.1.2 What is Required.md>)
- [8.1.3 What is Predicted](<8.1.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [8.1.4 What is Confirmed](<8.1.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [8.1.5 What is Concluded](<8.1.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [8. Expanding the Field](<8. Expanding the Field.md>) | [8.1.1 What is Disputed](<8.1.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
