Curiosity, Clarity, Valence: A Structural Philosophy of Mind for Coherence, Meaning, and Psychological Dynamics

Human experience is structured, meaningful, temporally extended, and affectively weighted. A theory of mind must account not only for information processing, but also for coherence, breakdown, emotional significance, and lived transformation across time. The Curiosity, Clarity, Valence (CCV) framework is proposed as a structural architecture of minded experience. It describes an ongoing negotiation between stability and destabilization through four elements: clarity (referential coherence of self and world models), entropy (unresolved uncertainty and contradiction), valence (initial orienting that becomes meaning bearing), and curiosity (conditional openness that engages when significance is high and uncertainty is survivable). A developmentally expanding recurrence buffer supports temporal organization and interpretability. In this account, minded experience is continuously organized through a set of primitive, pre-linguistic interrogative orientations, specifically what, where, when, how, and why, which function as structural demands upon experience, with language developing as a graded elaboration of these orienting requirements.

CCV is presented as a philosophy of mind proposal rather than an empirical model. Its primary claim is structural and ontological: meaningful conscious experience plausibly arises from architectures with these relational dynamics. The framework is evaluated in terms of coherence, phenomenological plausibility, and consistency with cognitive, affective, and predictive processing literatures, and is secondarily applied to trauma, depression, flow, moral injury, and developmental change. CCV does not compete with existing theories but argues that they describe different aspects of a single structural architecture of minded experience. It is offered as a disciplined, computationally formalizable framework that invites critique, refinement, simulation, and exploration.