*Premeditation and passion in criminal law.* The legal distinction between passion and premeditation tracks the same structure. A crime of passion is not innocent, but its modal depth is contracted toward reaction: provocation, panic, rage, fear, or bodily activation narrows the field and accelerates response. At the extreme, intense affect does not merely narrow the field but overrides the agent's access to it, so that the body discharges ahead of any selection the agent could have made — a partial return toward the involuntary reflex ([§8.9.3](<8.9.3 What is Predicted.md>)), which is why provocation mitigates culpability rather than aggravating it: the agency premeditation exercises in full was, in the moment, partly displaced. Premeditation is more will-saturated because the agent had more distance: time to model the act, foresee consequence, inhibit drive, revise intention, abandon the line, or continue anyway. Criminal law has long tracked modal depth under other names. It punishes premeditation more severely because the agent participated more fully in keeping the harmful possibility live until it became actual. The differential sentencing across common-law jurisdictions (first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter) is not arbitrary: it is a centuries-old empirical calibration of culpability against modal depth, refined under adversarial pressure across millions of cases. Hart's (1968) analysis of mens rea, and the Anglo-American tradition more broadly (Moore 1997; Robinson 1997; Husak 2010), names the structural variable without naming it as such.

*Consent.* Consent depends on modal depth. Consent requires more than verbal selection: it requires a subject whose modal network is developed enough to understand what the option means — what is being asked, what consequences may follow, what alternatives exist, whether refusal is safe, whether power is asymmetrical, and what future self-states may be affected. A choice can be formally available while the agent lacks sufficient modal competence for the choice to count as consent. The relevant question is whether the will behind the word had enough mapped possibility to understand the act as a choice, not whether a word was spoken. Contemporary work in bioethics (Beauchamp and Childress 2019; Faden and Beauchamp 1986) and sexual-consent law converges on the same finding from clinical and legal directions: informed, voluntary, and competent consent are the three conditions, each tracking a dimension of modal depth (information = forward map, voluntariness = inhibition capacity, competence = accumulated map). Read through the two axes of free will ([§8.9.5](<8.9.5 What is Concluded.md>)), consent is the exercise of will over one's own field: knowing what a decision makes possible — *if I do this, these outcomes; if I do that, those* — and weighing those outcomes oneself, with the latitude to act on the weighing. Its two failure modes follow directly. Deception and immaturity corrupt the field, so that the outcomes weighed are not the real ones — the lied-to and the child assent to a decision whose scope they cannot map. Coercion ordinarily leaves the field intact and removes the latitude, so that the outcomes are understood but cannot be freely acted on — the threatened assent to what they would otherwise refuse, though pressure severe enough to contract the field as well returns the case to the impairment analysis above. The child is the limiting case of the first: a real selection over a field too shallow to hold the decision, which is consent in form without consent in substance.

*Impairment.* Impairment cases show why the modal-depth test must remain general rather than scenario-bound. Intoxication, panic, coercive pressure, dissociation, developmental immaturity, and other contractions of the modal field can narrow the subject's capacity to understand the act as a choice. The principle is not that one external marker mechanically settles consent or blame. The principle is that consent requires enough modal depth for self-rule, and responsibility intensifies where one will knowingly uses another subject's contracted agency as the medium for its own end. Where impairment is shared, ambiguous, or symmetrical, the analysis cannot simply assign predatory asymmetry by formula; it must ask whether one subject's will actually governed, exploited, or overrode the other's. The framework therefore gives a general structural test, not an endless catalog of moral or legal scenarios. Forensic and clinical practice — from the *M'Naghten* rules forward through *Durham* and the Model Penal Code — has been refining versions of the same test across more than a century of case law.

*Developmental neuroscience.* The progressive maturation of prefrontal inhibitory capacity through adolescence and into the mid-twenties (Casey, Jones, and Hare 2008; Steinberg 2008; Giedd et al. 1999) confirms the predicted architecture from a third direction. The capacity to hold alternatives open, inhibit immediate response, and revise the map develops slowly across the lifespan of the human brain, and legal-moral practice has independently calibrated to it: minors are presumed to have contracted modal depth and are held to differentially weighted standards. The structural prediction — modal depth as a function of accumulated map plus current inhibitory capacity — and the developmental record converge.

*Pathology.* Damage to prefrontal cortex (Damasio 1994; Bechara et al. 1994), severe addiction (Volkow et al. 2016), and certain dissociative and impulse-control disorders all narrow the modal field in measurable ways, and the narrowing produces behavioral patterns the structural account predicts: contracted future modeling, weakened inhibition, line-locked responding, and impoverished alternative-holding. The phenomenology, the neuroscience, and the legal-clinical assessment converge on the same variable from independent directions.

*Decision neuroscience and predictive processing.* Computational accounts of action selection — model-based versus model-free reinforcement learning (Daw, Niv, and Dayan 2005), active-inference frameworks (Friston 2010; Hohwy 2013), and the role of prefrontal cortex in deliberate line-comparison versus habitual response (Miller and Cohen 2001) — describe the same gradient from a fourth direction. Model-free responding is the modal-mapping system running its accumulated lines without reopening the field; model-based deliberation is the system holding alternatives open, simulating consequences, and revising before action. The literature does not name the variable modal depth, but the variable it tracks is the same.

Criminal law, bioethics, forensic practice, developmental neuroscience, neuropsychology, and computational decision research all address capacities relevant to deliberation, control, and consent. Their constructs and purposes differ, and they do not independently confirm the book's modal-depth architecture. The framework offers one way of integrating these literatures, while the philosophical debates about free will and responsibility remain live.


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← [8.9.3 What is Predicted](<8.9.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [8.9.5 What is Concluded](<8.9.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
