Salience-Deficit Asymmetry

Canonical definition

The load-bearing asymmetry beneath the surface symmetry of the AIM Integration Equation. Appetites and Intrinsic Motivation each encode a genuine deficit over Objects, a homeostatic set-point departure for A that some Object would close, which may be a condition of the Individual's own body and then needs no third thing to be corrected through, and for I the absence of an Object that would support the engagement the Thinker is seeking, whether an instrument, a problem, a material, a collaborator, or a condition of the Individual's own body such as fitness, while Mimetic Desire encodes no deficit at all but only Salience, a reading of which Objects the surrounding environment marks as valued, supplied by an Observer whose domain is the unbounded environment rather than any bounded internal state. All three are directed at Objects, which is what makes them commensurable enough for the Decision Hub to sum. Because Common-Currency Integration strips source-tags (Source Opacity), a Salience reading and a deficit reading become formally indistinguishable once integrated, and the Decision Hub, which has one interpretive category for a positive action-demanding Scalar, reads the Salience signal as deficit. The felt-deficit character of M is therefore conferred at integration rather than carried in the signal at encoding; the Salience reading itself is real and fully formed, and what integration supplies is the only interpretive category available for it. A deficit signal carries its own termination condition, since closing the deficit silences it; a Salience signal carries none, because the quantity it reads has no terminal value. That M is non-satiating and that M is felt as deficit are therefore the same result stated twice.