Emotion as System: A Foundational Architecture for Affect, Meaning, Perception, and Action

Individual-level affective science explains how a single mind constructs an emotional state. This paper proposes the next layer up. It offers a foundational systems architecture that describes emotion as structural behavior, operable at individual, collective, and computational scales. Within this architecture, affect operates as an energetic substrate. Emotion configures a global field of sensitivity and responsiveness. Meaning introduces mass that deforms the field. Perception traces trajectories through it. Action follows gradients shaped by its geometry. The vocabulary of field, mass, trajectory, and gradient is precise enough to be operationalized computationally, tested empirically, and extended through design. Recent interpretability work on large language models recovers the same primary axes of valence and arousal, and the same clustered geometry, that organize human affective experience. This provides convergent evidence that emotion has computable structure. The contribution here is architectural: it supplies a system definition that makes emotion available as an object of formal reasoning across disciplines, and it begins where individual-level frameworks end.