Editing Openai/6973e373-2b8c-800d-84b7-d7001cfc6bac (section)

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Your meta-cluster is describing a functional loop:
* low-cost self-protection → biased cognition → poor repair → reinforcement → trajectory

Arousal doesn’t belong in that loop as a “cause” in the same class, because it doesn’t reliably produce that specific loop. It just changes how well a person can run any loop.

So it’s cleaner to treat arousal as:
* a state variable that modulates performance,
* not as a constitutive part of the meta-cluster itself.

===== You’re right: unless you can measure it (or have unmistakable behavioral markers over time), “they’re flooded” becomes a convenient explanatory shortcut. =====

And that’s exactly the kind of “mindreading” critics will seize on.

Keeping it out unless it’s tangible is epistemically disciplined.

===== You’re already modeling what matters: =====
* not “are they flooded?”
* but “does their cognition remain sufficiently functional under stressors?”

That subsumes flooding as a special case of state-dependent degradation.