What This Theory Is Not

A framework that sounds like several existing accounts, and that uses a word -- stress -- already carrying a different technical meaning, needs to say plainly what it is not. This document does that, one boundary at a time.

Some of the confusions are terminological. The Language of Stress is not a theory of psychological stress as commonly understood -- anxiety, overload, distress -- and the word is being used for something else. Others are structural. It is not affective labeling, where valence is assigned to states after the fact; not reinforcement learning, where value is a scalar reward signal to be maximized; not predictive processing reframed, though the overlap is substantial and the document says exactly where; not global workspace theory, not integrated information theory, not purely functionalist, not dualist, not a metaphorical framework, not illusionism, not panpsychism, and not reductive materialism. The entries on predictive processing, global workspace theory and integrated information theory each state what the other account holds and concede what it gets right before saying how this one differs, so that a reader can check whether the characterization is fair.