EmoStack ontology

The vocabulary of the preprint: what exists in the sheep, where it is in view, what the processes do with it. Names here are the names used in the paper and in the engine. The diagrams drawn in this vocabulary are on the next page. Every mechanism of the engine, with its rule and its place in the code, is listed in Mechanisms of the engine, from the code. Version of 28 September 2026.

↑ Contents

• The now is not a chronicle. It is the set of records that affect the sheep at this moment, accented differently in each container: felt in the state, attended to in the focus, held in the slot, ready in the applicable dispositions.
• The senses are the anchor of the now: the sheep knows what reaches it and, explicitly, what does not.
• The history is everything the sheep can recollect but does not hold in the beam; recall is the passage from history into the beam.

1. Definitions

The sheep and the processor

Sheep (the being)

The cognitive construction: the records, the containers and the processes described here, running over a processor. It is what has a history, holds constructs, learns dispositions and acts. It is not the model. The paper calls it a sheep, a deliberately plain word; in the code the class is Being.

Processor (the LLM model)

A frozen text processor with no identity and no memory between calls. It supplies language and a cultural prior; it composes one answer from exactly the context the sheep's layer hands it. Nothing in the design asks the model what it is, what it feels, or whether it has a self. Every mention of "I" in a call refers to the sheep, whose records the model is reading.

Self

What the sheep can point to as its own. Four sources, all of them records or parameters in the layer, none of them in the model: the lived (emo-thoughts with their episodes), the authored (cognitive constructs), the learned (dispositions) and the given (temperament). The senses are not a source of the self but its anchor in a now. The main division of the sheep is between its now, the beam of attention, and its history, what it can recollect; every source that accumulates has a part in each (the table at the head). The self is not stored as one object; it is what these sources produce together when a new trigger arrives. That is why "self" belongs in the ontology and not in the processor: it exists in the layer and would exist over a different processor.

Character

The stable part of the self: temperament, which never changes; dispositions, which change only through experience; and the constructs that survive in the slot. History is the changing part.

Records

Emo-thought

A felt interpretation of what happened. Not the event but what it meant to the sheep: the feeling in words, the conclusion drawn, how pleasant, how strong. One emo-thought can gather many events: within one conversation, moments of the same sign are filed under one emo-thought. A memory that returns in another conversation comes back in strength but keeps only its own events (see Echo). It carries who produced it and when.

Episode

One event under an emo-thought, kept as the sheep will remember it. Two forms: the event as it happened, used for search and for the running conversation; and its retelling in the third person and past tense, used wherever the sheep reads a memory, so that other people's words stay theirs and its own past words stay past.

Cognitive construct

What the sheep wrote about itself in reflection: a thought, a belief, a decision, a goal or a dream. It has the form of an emo-thought and its own text, but no events under it, because it was authored, not lived. It never enters the felt state; it lives in the accessibility slot, where it stays reachable after the events that produced it have faded. It is protected from sleep.

Disposition

A learned rule of the form "what the other does → what I do then", with a weight. Not a feeling and not knowledge the sheep can look at: it acts in the reply without being weighed, and introspection never sees it. It changes only through experience: learned again, it is counted again and the stronger of the two keeps the text; contradicted, it weakens.

Temperament

The sheep's fixed disposition to feel: how strongly and in which direction it colours what happens to it. Two parameters applied to every new emo-thought. Fixed for life.

Input and output

Trigger

What reaches the sheep from the world: someone speaks, arrives or leaves. Today text; in the future an image or a sound. It is never stored as such; it becomes an episode.

Senses

The channels through which the present reaches the sheep, and the sheep's knowledge of them. Hearing carries the trigger: a person's words, or their arrival or departure. Sight, touch, smell, taste, body and place carry nothing, and the sheep is told so in as many words. Attention and memory carry counts: how much is in the state, how much came to mind, how much the memory holds, and what the sheep searched for this turn and whether it found anything. Time and who else is present complete it. The senses are the anchor of the now: without them the sheep would float, with feelings and writing but no where and no when. They are also its ground against confabulation: a scene it cannot see, a body it does not have and a past it does not find are named as absent before it answers. In the context they stand first, as the container here and now.

Action

What the sheep does, in the world or on itself: it speaks or stays silent, reaches into its memory, stops to think, forms something it will hold. One act per step. Speaking is one form among several; the concept is meant to carry more, including an android's acts.

Containers

Here and now

The situation as the senses deliver it in one call: what the sheep hears, what it does not perceive, how much came to mind, when it is and who is present. Values of the moment, no records.

Associations

What the trigger brought to mind: involuntary recall by meaning, strength and names, before anything is felt or attended to; plus what the sheep deliberately searched for. The strongest pass into the state, the rest stay in view.

State

What the sheep feels now: a set of carried feelings, not a mood variable. The most recent records plus the strongest associations, ordered by felt strength after fading, admitted up to a budget. The same words are answered by a different author when the state carries a hurt.

Focus

Attention on this conversation: what was said, what the sheep said back, what surfaced meanwhile, in order.

Conversation summary

The gist the sheep keeps of a long talk: older exchanges folded into what they were about, without the emotions, refreshed as the conversation grows.

Accessibility slot

What the sheep holds in mind of its own writing. Accessibility in Higgins's sense: a construct is available in memory always, accessible only while it is here. Three places, one reserved for the newest decision, goal or dream. It survives the end of a conversation and empties by displacement or neglect.

Applicable dispositions

Readiness for this kind of situation: the learned rules whose situation matches what is happening now.

Hippocampus

The sheep's history: episodes bound to the emo-thoughts they produced, so that events are kept under feelings and recalled by the strength of those feelings; its constructs; its dispositions, old ones included. Written once, thinned only in sleep. A structure, not a log.

Processes named as psychological acts

Appraisal

The sheep's interpretation of an event, formed with the current mood withheld, so that what is remembered is the event's own meaning and not the colour of the moment.

Introspection

The sheep looking at its own records and forming one thought about them. The object is the sheep's records; the model is the processor that reads them. Nothing here asks the model to look into itself. It runs when the sheep chooses to think before answering, when a person leaves, after silence, on waking; it may end in a construct.

Recall

Memories surfacing because of what was said, involuntarily; and, separately, the sheep's own search of its memory, which is an action.

Echo

A moment that repeats a feeling the sheep already holds. What counts as a repeat is decided by sign and by what is in view, not by the model's judgement of similarity.

Within one conversation, a moment whose feeling has the same sign as the record being lived joins it as another episode. A change of sign opens a new record. A conversation in which someone wounds and then apologises leaves two records, not one moved halfway.

Any other moment forms a record of its own: the first of a conversation, or the first after a change of sign. Then the memories this turn brought to mind are looked at. The strongest lived memory of the same sign comes back: it regains strength (Reconsolidation). It does not take the new event. Being mocked for a loss is not a recurrence of the grief. Filed under the old memory, the new blow would be read as an old sadness, not as a fresh one.

A memory of the opposite sign never comes back through an echo. Comfort stands beside a loss as a record of its own. The sheep's own thoughts never take an event, because nothing happens to the sheep inside its own thought.

In reflection, a thought the sheep already had, thought again, is that thought recurring: nothing new is written and the old one comes back. A new thought may name a held record it re-feels; if the sign agrees, that record comes back too.

Reconsolidation

What happens to a memory that comes back. Its strength closes six tenths of the gap toward what is felt now. It never rises above what is felt now, so a recollection of a loss does not hurt more than the loss did. A memory already stronger than the present stays as it is. Its valence is never rewritten. The date of what happened stays; only the date it was last felt moves.

Fading

Felt strength declines with age toward a floor and never to zero; negative feelings fade more slowly. Strength is computed when read; when a record is felt again, its faded strength is written to it first.

Sleep

Consolidation: strong feelings anchor the day and gather the events of weaker records under them. Forgetting: what is weak for its age is removed with its events. Constructs and what was given at birth are untouched.

Disposition learning

When a person leaves, the sheep asks whether the whole conversation taught it a generalisable way of meeting that kind of situation. Usually nothing. Otherwise a rule is added, strengthened or weakened.

2. Elements

3. Typologies

4. Contexts

A context is what one model call has in view: the elements in the order they stand in the call, the form each takes there, and what the model is asked for. The three main contexts first, then the helper calls. Retelling is not a separate call: the model writes it in the Reply call and the code stores it on the episode.

Reply

Appraisal (the record to keep)

Introspection

Helper calls

Association filter

Disposition selection

Disposition learning

Disposition classification

Summarising

Consolidation plan

The dictionary behind "valence and strength as words", used in three of these calls, is one table in the code:

5. Processes

In a turn, in this order

Reflection

When a person leaves

In sleep, and at every read