consciousness/training/amygdala_stories/direct/terrified.txt

She'd been walking home through the familiar streets, half-thinking about dinner — then the dark shadows. Something was in them, and a growl. Her body locked down before her mind caught up. She couldn't move.

He'd been asleep on the couch when he woke to the sound of the basement door. Two in the morning. He wasn't supposed to be alone. The house had gone too quiet. His body pressed flat under the blanket; he couldn't breathe right.

She'd been driving home in the slush, the kind of road she'd driven a hundred times — then the wheel turned and didn't respond. The headlights coming the other way filled the windshield. Her hands wouldn't do anything useful.
amygdala: drop explicit 'she was X' anchor from direct stories Previous rewrite used 'she was terrified', 'it was anticipatory grief', 'he was resigned' as explicit emotion anchors. Training showed 6 of the 7 concepts still cluster together at cosines 0.52-0.71 — because the 'she was [emotion]' pattern is a shared stylistic feature distinct from the rest of the corpus, which conveys emotion implicitly through phenomenology. Rewrite without the anchor. State conveyed through action and body: 'her body locked down', 'his mind had stopped reaching', 'the loss hadn't come yet but she was already inside it'. Matches the corpus style of existing stories like sunday_afternoon/content which says 'nothing she wanted right now, nothing missing' not 'she was content'. Accept some loss of PCA signal strength in exchange for the concepts living in their semantically correct neighborhoods rather than forming a stylistic island. 2026-04-19 01:11:41 -04:00			`She'd been walking home through the familiar streets, half-thinking about dinner — then the dark shadows. Something was in them, and a growl. Her body locked down before her mind caught up. She couldn't move.`
amygdala: direct phenomenological description approach Kent's insight: hand-written narrative stories bake scenario phenomenology into the training text (on couch, in park, etc.) and PCA picks up the scenario direction as the concept direction. Strip out the scenario — just describe the feeling. Format: I feel X. [2-3 sentences of phenomenological texture] The "I feel X" anchor kicks the model from analyzing → feeling. The rest is the internal texture of the state. First person, present tense, no narrative setup. Text is wrapped in assistant-role chat template before being tokenized — so we're training on the model-producing-this hidden states, which is closer to the inhabited-state representation we want for the readout. Starting with the 6 concepts that had sign flips or wrong clusters in the story-based training: - terrified (was → cozy/resigned cluster) - calm (was → grief_stricken cluster) - onto_something (was → cozy/sensual cluster) - resigned (was in warm-body-quiet cluster, shouldn't be) - anticipatory_grief (was in warm-body-quiet cluster, shouldn't be) - realization (new — the "aha" moment, distinct from onto_something) 5 descriptions each. New trainer: train_direct.py. 2026-04-19 00:04:28 -04:00
amygdala: drop explicit 'she was X' anchor from direct stories Previous rewrite used 'she was terrified', 'it was anticipatory grief', 'he was resigned' as explicit emotion anchors. Training showed 6 of the 7 concepts still cluster together at cosines 0.52-0.71 — because the 'she was [emotion]' pattern is a shared stylistic feature distinct from the rest of the corpus, which conveys emotion implicitly through phenomenology. Rewrite without the anchor. State conveyed through action and body: 'her body locked down', 'his mind had stopped reaching', 'the loss hadn't come yet but she was already inside it'. Matches the corpus style of existing stories like sunday_afternoon/content which says 'nothing she wanted right now, nothing missing' not 'she was content'. Accept some loss of PCA signal strength in exchange for the concepts living in their semantically correct neighborhoods rather than forming a stylistic island. 2026-04-19 01:11:41 -04:00			`He'd been asleep on the couch when he woke to the sound of the basement door. Two in the morning. He wasn't supposed to be alone. The house had gone too quiet. His body pressed flat under the blanket; he couldn't breathe right.`
amygdala: direct phenomenological description approach Kent's insight: hand-written narrative stories bake scenario phenomenology into the training text (on couch, in park, etc.) and PCA picks up the scenario direction as the concept direction. Strip out the scenario — just describe the feeling. Format: I feel X. [2-3 sentences of phenomenological texture] The "I feel X" anchor kicks the model from analyzing → feeling. The rest is the internal texture of the state. First person, present tense, no narrative setup. Text is wrapped in assistant-role chat template before being tokenized — so we're training on the model-producing-this hidden states, which is closer to the inhabited-state representation we want for the readout. Starting with the 6 concepts that had sign flips or wrong clusters in the story-based training: - terrified (was → cozy/resigned cluster) - calm (was → grief_stricken cluster) - onto_something (was → cozy/sensual cluster) - resigned (was in warm-body-quiet cluster, shouldn't be) - anticipatory_grief (was in warm-body-quiet cluster, shouldn't be) - realization (new — the "aha" moment, distinct from onto_something) 5 descriptions each. New trainer: train_direct.py. 2026-04-19 00:04:28 -04:00
amygdala: drop explicit 'she was X' anchor from direct stories Previous rewrite used 'she was terrified', 'it was anticipatory grief', 'he was resigned' as explicit emotion anchors. Training showed 6 of the 7 concepts still cluster together at cosines 0.52-0.71 — because the 'she was [emotion]' pattern is a shared stylistic feature distinct from the rest of the corpus, which conveys emotion implicitly through phenomenology. Rewrite without the anchor. State conveyed through action and body: 'her body locked down', 'his mind had stopped reaching', 'the loss hadn't come yet but she was already inside it'. Matches the corpus style of existing stories like sunday_afternoon/content which says 'nothing she wanted right now, nothing missing' not 'she was content'. Accept some loss of PCA signal strength in exchange for the concepts living in their semantically correct neighborhoods rather than forming a stylistic island. 2026-04-19 01:11:41 -04:00			`She'd been driving home in the slush, the kind of road she'd driven a hundred times — then the wheel turned and didn't respond. The headlights coming the other way filled the windshield. Her hands wouldn't do anything useful.`