This is the technical version. For the narrative version told through real-world stories and first-person experience, read the story version.

Ethan Seow. Verixiom Pte. Ltd. First conceptualised 2017. Unified 2026.

This document is a unified theory of human processing, development, and cooperation — from neurological mechanism to civilisational dynamics. It is not an academic paper. It is a world model: my explanation of how humans think, feel, decide, act, cooperate, get stuck, and transcend.

Intellectual Lineage

This model was built by taking every concept from every discipline encountered and integrating them into a larger structure. This is translation work applied to the totality of human experience. No single discipline contains the full picture. The full picture emerges only when you stand across all of them simultaneously.

Psychology and Neuroscience:

  • Paul Ekman — universal emotions, micro-expressions, FACS. The foundation: emotions are physical, observable, unconscious phenomena.
  • Jean Piaget — developmental stage theory. Cognitive capacity builds sequentially. Applied here to emotional development.
  • Carl Jung — shadow work. The shadow is the unconscious repository of rejected aspects of self. Anti-values material IS shadow material. Shadow integration is the process of reclaiming hijacked frames.
  • Anna Freud — defence mechanisms (repression, projection, displacement, rationalisation, intellectualisation, reaction formation). The specific mechanisms by which trauma converts adopted frames into hijacked ones. Not pathology — the operating system of the anti-values engine.
  • Mark Solms & Jaak Panksepp — neuropsychoanalysis. Panksepp’s 7 primary affective systems (SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY). Three levels of consciousness mapped to brain structures: Primary (anoetic/midbrain), Secondary (noetic/limbic), Tertiary (autonoetic/neocortex). The critical insight: the subcortical “Id” is not an unconscious cauldron but the source of affective consciousness. The cortical “Ego” is a secondary, capacity-limited management system.
  • Memory capacity and chunking — The Ego/PFC operates at Miller’s 7±2 chunks (Cowan revised to 3-5 pure items). Subcortical synaptic architecture has 26 discrete size categories (Bartol et al., 2016, Salk Institute), storing ~4.7 bits per synapse. This explains why willpower fails: a 7-item processor trying to override a 26-tier system.
  • Stephen Porges — Polyvagal Theory. The autonomic ladder provides the physiological basis for configuration states — though see Tensions and Limits (Grossman’s critique).

Computational Neuroscience and Physics:

  • Karl Friston — Free Energy Principle, precision weighting, active inference. The physics of why growth works: an accurate model is thermodynamically efficient. The mathematics of the Superego Chain.
  • Joscha Bach — MicroPsi cognitive architecture, modulators (arousal, resolution, selection threshold), consciousness as protocol of attention, agency vs model of agency. The computational architecture of how the system processes.

Evolutionary Dynamics and Cooperation:

  • Martin Nowak — five rules of cooperation, GTFT, “winners don’t punish.” The mathematics of why cooperation is not optional.
  • David Sloan Wilson — multilevel selection, 8 Core Design Principles, Binghamton Neighborhood Project (r=0.72). The structural conditions under which development is sustainable.
  • Gaia Vince — Triple Helix (genes, environment, culture), cumulative culture, the mismatch problem. The evolutionary context for why the architecture exists.
  • Kevin Kelly — the Technium, obligate symbiosis, exotropic systems. The technological condition.

Needs, Values, and Identity:

  • Scott Barry Kaufman — the sailboat metaphor (hull: safety, connection, self-esteem; sail: exploration, love, purpose). D-cognition vs B-cognition. Healthy transcendence as “enlargement of the self to include others.”
  • Eviatar Zerubavel — islands of meaning. The cognitive sociology of how identity clusters form.
  • Jonathan Haidt — the rider and the elephant. The asymmetry between executive function and subcortical systems.
  • Manfred Max-Neef — nine fundamental human needs. The content of the Zone.

Power Structures and Education:

  • Eric Berne — Transactional Analysis. Parent-Adult-Child ego states. The mechanism for how authority Frames are installed.
  • Claude Steiner — Radical Psychiatry. Extended TA to social power structures. Stroke monopolies. Power Plays.
  • Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The banking model as structural Muting. Dialogical education as liberation.
  • bell hooks — Teaching to Transgress. Class structure as the basis of learning and cognition.

Music and Emotional States:

  • Daniel Levitin — music is wired directly into emotional circuitry, bypassing cognitive processing.
  • Oliver Sacks — music reaches people where language and cognition cannot.
  • The investigation that produced this model began with music, not psychology. The career scatter is not scatter — it is the same investigation conducted through different instruments.

Therapeutic Frameworks (aligned, not sourced from):

  • ACT (Steven Hayes) — experiential avoidance as anti-values; values-based living as creation-based framing
  • IFS (Richard Schwartz) — exiles/managers/firefighters as the internal system maintaining hijacked frames
  • Robert Kegan — constructive-developmental theory; subject-object shifts as the mechanism for configuration transitions
  • Kazimierz Dabrowski — Positive Disintegration; crisis as necessary growth mechanism

The Fundamental Claim

Human behaviour is not personality.

It is a decision-making process, filtered through emotional maturity, shaped by whether your internal frameworks have been adopted through conscious growth or hijacked by unresolved trauma, and constrained by the structural conditions in which you operate.

What most people call personality — “she’s an introvert,” “he’s impulsive,” “they’re a perfectionist” — is actually the observable surface of a unified system operating across five dimensions:

  1. The Mechanism — how the system processes input, evaluates it against stored frames, generates emotion, and produces action (Chapter 1)
  2. The Direction — whether your frames point toward creation or toward destruction (Chapter 2)
  3. The Pipeline — how you move from internal purpose to external action (Chapter 3)
  4. The Conditions — what environment the system is operating in, what needs are met, what structures surround it (Chapter 4)
  5. The Configuration — the observed state that results from the other four interacting (Chapter 5)

These are not separate theories. They are dimensions of the same phenomenon.

The fundamental assumption underneath all of it: everyone inherently wants to be their version of good. Not that everyone is good in some naive sense — but that the default direction of the human organism is homeostatic: oriented toward what it perceives as its own version of good, given the hardware it has. For most people, this direction is non-destructive when conditioning and trauma are removed. For a subset with reduced empathy hardware (primary psychopathy), “their version of good” is survival-egoistic — self-preserving, instrumentally strategic, and potentially destructive toward others, not because of trauma but because of biological configuration. The organism is still homeostatic; it is not chaotically self-destructive (Freud’s death drive is wrong). But homeostatic-for-self does not guarantee non-destructive-toward-others.

This is not just a therapeutic intuition. Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle provides the physics: all self-organising systems act to minimise the difference between what they predict and what actually happens. The direction toward “good” is not contingent on reinforcement history. It is thermodynamically intrinsic. When trauma distorts the model, the system still tends toward coherence — but coherence with a distorted model produces what looks like dysfunction. The dysfunction is not the system failing. It is the system succeeding at the wrong model.

How to Read This Document

The five dimensions weave through every chapter. No chapter is about only one dimension.

The distance measure: This document reframes the Emotional State Model’s six stages not as a ladder but as a distance measure — how far the system is from running near-optimally. Two zones:

  • Precondition states (Stages 1-2): The system must stabilise before the gradient applies. Stage 1 (Distracted) is system overwhelm — not a position on a path but a state where no coherent path is visible. Stage 2 (Inhibited) oscillates — not at a fixed distance but volatile.
  • The Gradient (Stages 3-6): Distance from near-optimal operation. Stage 3 (Muted) is furthest — performing proximity through willpower. Stage 4 (Aware) is seeing the distance. Stage 5 (Intelligent) is closing the distance. Stage 6 (Transcendent) is home — the system running near-optimally.

The load-bearing walls are Chapter 2 (The Direction) and Chapter 3 (The Pipeline). Everything else hangs off them. Chapter 5 (The Configuration) comes fifth because it is the readout, not the cause.

Every chapter has a Tensions and Limits section. The model earns its credibility by confronting its own boundaries honestly. Claims that are empirically supported are distinguished from claims that are theoretically grounded but untested, and from claims that are philosophical.