The Cognitive Thread: 3 Emotion as Metabolic Readiness Modulation

Emotion is typically treated as a qualitative interior state: a feeling, a valence, an affect.

Psychology toggles between two bad options:

• emotion as internal content (a subjective colouration of experience)

• emotion as a mechanism (a module triggering behavioural responses)

Both inherit the same metaphysical mistake:

they treat the organism as a container with inner states.

A relational ontology eliminates the container entirely.

There is no interior “emotion” to be felt, repressed, or expressed.

There is only the system’s dynamic modulation of readiness — the metabolic reconfiguration of the horizon.

Emotion is not something the organism has.

It is something the organism does to its relational potential.

Emotion is metabolic readiness modulation.

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1. The Relational Premise: Readiness is Primary

Every living system maintains a structured horizon of potential:

• gradients it can incline toward

• gradients it must avoid

• couplings it is sensitive to

• actions it is prepared to enact

• alternatives it must inhibit

This field of readiness is metabolic through and through.

The organism does not first “feel an emotion” and then adjust behaviour.

The shift in readiness is the phenomenon psychology labels as emotion.

Emotion is the system’s re-tuning of its inclination landscape.

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2. The Metabolic Reconfiguration

A readiness field has two fundamental properties:

• availability (How much energy can be mobilised?)

• elasticity (How widely or narrowly can the horizon stretch?)

Emotions are ways of modulating these properties to reorganise how coupling takes place.

Here are the recuts, expressed relationally:

Fear

• narrows the horizon abruptly

• increases gradient sensitivity

• prioritises fast actualisation pathways

• suppresses alternative inclinations

Fear is not “negative affect.”

It is a metabolic constriction for survival-critical gradients.

Anger

• amplifies readiness

• decreases inhibitory thresholds

• widens immediate-action gradients while suppressing reflective ones

• increases environmental torque

Anger is not “arousal plus appraisal.”

It is metabolic overdrive for dominance or boundary enforcement.

Joy

• widens the horizon

• increases coupling bandwidth

• lowers metabolic cost for exploration

• enhances gradient diversity without collapse

Joy is not “positive emotion.”

It is metabolic surplus enabling ecological openness.

Sadness

• decreases global readiness

• collapses horizon elasticity

• stabilises low-energy patterns

• reduces gradient responsiveness

Sadness is not “low valence.”

It is metabolic conservation — forced horizon narrowing to prevent energetic overspend.

Each so-called “emotion” is a metabolic manoeuvre reshaping how the organism navigates gradients.

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3. Emotion as Horizon Reshaping, Not Inner Colouration

Once we re-situate emotion as readiness modulation, several things follow immediately:

• emotions are not internal feelings but relational states of coupling

• they govern how the horizon expands or contracts

• they tune the cost of shifting between inclinations

• they structure what counts as actionable possibility

• they prepare or prevent actualisation cuts

The point is not metaphorical.

Emotion literally configures the system’s way-of-being-in-relation.

Any feeling associated with emotion is a construal of this metabolic modulation, not the essence of emotion itself.

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4. Why Emotion Makes Cognition Possible

Attention requires the horizon to be sufficiently elastic to contract and expand.

Working memory requires energy to hold potentials open.

Construal requires gradients to remain stable long enough to actualise.

Emotion governs all three.

Emotion is the metabolic infrastructure of cognition:

• it determines how far the horizon can stretch

• how fast it can collapse

• how much energy is available to sustain contraction

• how many potential states can be held open

• how sensitive the system is to new gradients

• how strong inclinations must be to actualise

Without emotional modulation, attention becomes rigid, memory collapses, and construal becomes erratic.

Emotion is the condition for cognition, not its by-product.

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5. Against Psychologism: Emotion is Ecological, Not Mental

A hawk stooping is not “afraid.”

A wolf preparing to attack is not “angry.”

A child exploring a garden is not “joyful” in the psychological sense.

These are metabolic horizon reconfigurations enabling ecological strategies.

Emotion belongs to the relational dynamic of organism–environment coupling.

What humans call “feelings” are semiotic construals layered on top of these dynamics.

The mistake was ever to look inward.

Emotion is not interior affect.

Emotion is ecological readiness modulation.

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6. Why This Recut Matters

This model does what psychology cannot:

• grounds emotion biologically without mechanism

• integrates emotion into cognition without reducing it to appraisal

• shows emotion as a metabolic strategy, not a mental state

• positions emotion at the centre of horizon behaviour

• eliminates the duality of “affect vs cognition” entirely

• provides the conceptual foundation for intelligence as relational responsiveness

By replacing interior feelings with horizon reconfiguration, emotion becomes the system’s most fundamental lever for adjusting how actualisation becomes possible.

Emotion is not a colouration of experience.

It is the metabolic steering of potential.

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Next: Post 4 — Memory Without Storage: Horizon-Binding as Ecological Scaffolding