The Language of Stress:
A Value-Primitive Theory of Consciousness
The primary theoretical paper presenting the complete framework, zombie impossibility argument, six falsifiable predictions, and comparisons with competing theories.
Pace, J. C. (2026). The Language of Stress: A Value-Primitive Theory of Consciousness. FigShare. 10.6084/m9.figshare.31320532
Abstract
The Hard Problem of consciousness has proven resistant to frameworks that begin from information as the brain's foundational currency. Predictive Processing, Global Workspace Theory, and Integrated Information Theory each identify essential components of conscious systems, but the explanatory gap between informational process and phenomenal character persists in all three. I argue that this persistence is a consequence of the shared starting point rather than a puzzle arising within it, and I propose an alternative: the Language of Stress, a value-primitive framework identifying phenomenal experience with valenced tension dynamics in self-maintaining systems under prioritization pressure.
On this account, organisms maintain a unified Value Topography in which deviations from defended archetypes generate topographical distortion, experienced as stress, eustress, or relief. These distortions, shaped by rigidity, anticipatory gradients, and self-relevance, are the common currency of incommensurable demands: not a unit into which the demands are converted, but one structure in which they act together.
The central argument is that, where a system deliberates -- holding a demand unmet while it weighs ways of meeting it -- prioritization among incommensurable demands cannot be terminated by any purely representational state. Reflex can settle competing demands, since nothing in it is read, but it cannot deliberate. Any proposed mechanism is either fixed, in which case each demand's significance for action was settled before the conflict it is supposed to settle, or adaptive, in which case deciding how to update regenerates the same weighing problem one level higher. A state that is simultaneously the measure of priority and the motivation to act on it, with no interpretive step between, escapes both horns. I argue that such a state is what phenomenal experience is.
I state clearly what this establishes and what it leaves open. The argument, if sound, establishes an architectural requirement. Identifying that requirement with phenomenality is a further inference, and it is where critique is most usefully directed. The framework specifies four architectural requirements as criteria for candidacy -- persistent self-model, variable rigidity, genuine stakes, and a unified value space in which demands can be held unmet while ways of meeting them are rehearsed -- and four falsification criteria.