Coherence Evaluation, Feelings, and Emotions: The Felt Layer of Regulation

This concept paper argues that feelings and emotions belong to a phenomenally available layer through which a cognitive system registers the significance of its current and projected state for viable continuation. Building on a broader framework of coherence evaluation, the paper proposes that what becomes felt depends not only on the present state, but also on trajectory, available continuation, and accumulated uncompensated load. It further argues that coherence-related evaluation is primary in a pre-symbolic sense, while symbolic description is a later reconstruction, and that inner manifestation is broader than what becomes expressed or enacted. A central claim of the paper is that positive manifestation belongs not to a special positive state, but only to movement toward stabilization. The article offers a minimal conceptual account of why a cognitive system needs a felt layer and how feelings and emotions can be understood as different scales of that regulatory function.The present article does not argue that phenomenality is something over and above regulation. It argues that, in systems of the relevant kind, certain regulatory distinctions must become inwardly available in a way that is not merely hidden, symbolic, or externally describable. It is this inwardly distinguishable availability that is here treated as the minimal sense of the felt layer.