What a Value Primitive Forbids
A Constraint Map for the Language of Stress
A proposal for testing whether a value-primitive theory of consciousness can unify findings across literatures that currently have no contact with each other.
Pace, J. C. (2026). What a Value Primitive Forbids: A Constraint Map for the Language of Stress. FigShare. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.34000995
Overview
A proposal for testing whether a value-primitive theory of consciousness can unify findings across literatures that currently have no contact with each other. The document does not claim breadth. It claims that two commitments of the Language of Stress each forbid something, and it states in advance how each prohibition would fail.
The resolution prohibition is derived from the structure of the framework's distortion relation. Because distortion is produced by four factors, anything that reduces it must act on one of them, and the operations each factor admits can be enumerated. The result is a closed set of seven routes to resolution. The paper gives a criterion that keeps the set from absorbing every improvement, a way to tell adjacent routes apart by their predicted response to the next event rather than by self-report, and a scope condition: archetypes share elements, so the loss of one element can invalidate a whole region at once. That condition yields an account of grief in which pain and emptiness are different quantities, and a mirror case in which the arrival of one element makes a whole region of long-held ideals reachable at once.
The installation prohibition follows from the framework's central thesis: information does not install or move value by being informational. It changes value only by changing what is at stake.
Five transfers state what the prohibitions would bind across domains, including word acquisition, bereavement severity, and responses to intervention. Each is given with what it forbids and what would falsify it, and each is positioned against its existing literature, including results that already put pressure on it. One can be approached now with existing paradigms. The rest wait on a measure of archetype rigidity that does not yet exist, which the document states plainly.
The paper also lists domains where the framework has no purchase, and domains where it can describe but not constrain, as part of the claim rather than as a disclaimer. No prediction of the framework has been confirmed. The document is a constraint map for an empirical program, not a report of unification achieved.