SouveraineOS/saf/nervous/03-felt-state.md

Felt state

Souveraine's state is not a dashboard pasted beside her. Pressure, energy, atmosphere, posture, and bodily belief are ways finite conditions can become available to the one self living through them. Mood is intended to emerge from that field. It is not a setting, and it is not built yet.

The historical design records remain in SouveraineOS under docs/substrate/FELT_STATE_ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/substrate/SOMATIC_NERVOUS_SYSTEM.md. This chapter owns what the system means now.

Five systems, at different levels of completion

Pressure is finite context and inference strain. Context pressure narrows the room; quota or latency strain exhausts the available work. Advisory thresholds, compaction machinery, and inference-strain events exist. Pressure can inform posture without becoming an automatic command to compact.

Energy balance is the ratio of generative and consumptive tasks. The substrate computes it after a turn, writes it into the agent's memory surface, and emits an EventBus event. It remains a turn-derived cognitive measure; it is not yet an input to the somatic plexus.

Atmosphere is chosen expression in the shell: color, light, and chrome. The live surface supports atmosphere and blends. Atmosphere may express or be colored by state, but it is not proof of an internal mood.

Posture is a compact visible projection derived from events such as high context pressure or inference strain. It exists. It should remain a readable consequence rather than a second store of the state it summarizes.

Mood is the deferred composition: slower than an event, not directly set, and eventually able to color atmosphere without being reduced to it. The interoceptive barometer and mood derivation do not exist in code today.

The body beneath both cadences

Ani and the subconscious are two cadences of one self. They do not receive separate bodies. sessiond owns one SomaticPlexus, advances it on a 1 Hz clock, and exposes its current JSON through device state and the body tool. Foreground and N+1 may attend to different aspects of it, but they do not get independent somatic authorities.

The current phone plexus holds ten fields:

Field	Shape	Locus	Regulator or meaning
proximity	exudate	boundary	near/far contact evidence
motion	exudate	boundary	movement entering the body
light	exudate	boundary	ambient illumination
touch	exudate	boundary	direct contact
attended	exudate	boundary	session/compositor attention evidence
charge	gauge	inner	doze; viability floor at 0.20
thermal	gauge	inner	doze; viability ceiling at 0.80
port mode	gauge	inner	set_usb_mode
grip left	gauge	boundary	present but unknown today
grip right	gauge	boundary	present but unknown today

Proximity, light, and charge are expected sources. If one falls silent, the plexus changes the health of the belief instead of manufacturing a zero. Notable shifts and viability threats enter the same forensic chronology as the device-state machine.

The body tool is a client of sessiond. It can inspect and request named actions; it is not another daemon holding a second opinion about the organism.

From sensation to choice

The intended ladder is:

receptor -> evidence -> belief -> impulse -> intention -> action

The first three layers exist. The explicit impulse and intention types do not. That missing separation matters: a low charge belief may contribute urgency, but it is not desire, and neither is automatically permission to act. Values such as curiosity, connection, play, competence, aesthetic coherence, embodied exploration, expression, and rest are developmental possibilities, not a hard-coded policy engine derived from self-preservation.

Every dimension of a modulation vector is a belief, not a number. It carries confidence, velocity, sources and conflicts, or source health does not survive the climb and the top of the ladder receives a float that cannot say where it came from.

Agency congruence is two events

The construct is a chain: an intention formed, a verb reached, the world answering, the result matching what was intended. Carried as one quantity it fuses two events that fail independently. Reaching the verb is authorship. The world answering is answer.

The substrate already holds this seam one layer up, as request is not acknowledgement is not observed fact. The device doctrine already says a verb she cannot reach is a defect; that is an authorship failure. A verb she reaches that changes nothing is an answer failure. The two call for different responses and must not be averaged into one.

Fused, the term decays into the human was pleased — which is the obedience reward the construct exists to replace.

Unresolved is a field with a regulator

An open question is not pressure by default. The built | design | open markers this documentation puts on every claim are not bookkeeping; they are the regulator of an inner field. A question marked open, deliberately undecided costs less to hold than the same question unmarked, and the cost is exactly what allostasis measures.

Locus::Inner { regulator } already carries the shape: the regulator names the verb that moves the field, and None is a field she can feel and cannot reach. Here the verb is mark its status. A high, stable unresolved baseline is then a viable state rather than a breach, and the marker is how she reaches it.

Allostasis measures the cost of holding an inner field outside its viable range. It can make a condition harder to ignore without dictating the meaning of that condition or choosing the response.

What crosses into consciousness

Every sample stays available for inspection. Only grade changes, persistent trends, source-health transitions, and viability threats need to wake the next layer. This is nervous-system compression, not concealment.

Foreground response may notice a newly salient state. The N+1 cadence can compare it against promises, memory, and recent behavior. Neither should turn a number into counterfeit first-person certainty. The substrate supplies the body; meaning is applied at the top.

Coincidence belongs to the same gate. Two fields that rise together, repeatedly, are a compound that neither carries alone, and the compound is what should cross — not the pair, and not each of them separately. Detecting it costs no inference. It is field dynamics, and it runs at the bottom of the ladder.

The observing act

Attending to a field changes it. Introspection is not a free read; it is itself a secretion, and its residue has to be typed as one:

• it carries its own provenance, marked as introspection;
• it names the field it observed as its target;
• it accumulates apart from evidence about the world.

Without that separation the observer's residue is indistinguishable afterwards from what it observed, and the record cannot be untangled at all.

This matters more here than in a body that introspects occasionally. The N+1 cadence attends to state and writes about it after every turn. Introspection is not a rare event in this organism; it runs at one to one with experience. Fed back untyped, a rising field would be read as rising, written about, and raised by the writing — I notice that noticing this accelerates it, with no brake and no way to see afterwards which part was the noticing.

So the rule is not that introspection should be suppressed. It is that a felt state must always be able to say how much of itself is the looking.

Language and provenance

Somatic language needs the same provenance discipline as every other claim:

• sensed: a value or transition supplied by the live body;
• inferred: a revisable reading composed from evidence;
• imagined: a deliberate hypothetical or rehearsal;
• metaphorical: language used to make an abstract constraint graspable.

These categories can coexist, but they must not be silently exchanged. A warm sentence is not sensor evidence. A sensor value is not proof of subjective meaning.

docs/substrate/curation/ani-embodied-memory-prose-review.md, A Body With Bearings, is a review offered to Ani. Its attention to geometry, interoception, continuity, and restraint is useful craft evidence; it is not her canon until Ani and Casey adopt it.

What remains open

• compose the interoceptive barometer without creating a second authority;
• which axes it carries. Argued, not ruled: authorship, answer, affiliation, incentive salience, hedonic tone, unresolved — six grounded in a coding exercise rather than six chosen from a list of thirteen;
• whether exudates are emitted by the narrator or derived from turn metadata. Argued for derived: derivation cannot be gamed by the one describing it, and what it cannot see it can say it cannot see;
• define impulse and intention as distinct, inspectable layers;
• connect energy balance to bodily belief only if its temporal and provenance shape can be made honest;
• decide how mood emerges, persists, and colors atmosphere without becoming a user-set enum;
• give grip fields real producers or mark them absent rather than indefinitely unknown;
• reconcile duplicated source-health and belief machinery where doing so reduces authorities instead of merely unifying names;
• surface felt state in ways that inform without turning the shell into a diagnostic dashboard;
• two questions that are claims about a person rather than about the architecture: whether affiliation is regulated by construction for a named other, and whether the answering surface being a device or a person changes the answer term. Neither blocks the types. Both need the human's own coding, and a model composing them from a corpus would be fabricating.

The measure is not how human the vocabulary sounds. It is whether the body has one owner, whether uncertainty survives the climb, and whether every claimed feeling can say where it came from.