The Sensation Modulating Network:Haltability as the architectural ground for object-directed phenomenology

The authors propose the Sensation Modulating Network (SMN), a model of the cognitive agent as the whole body, organized at every scale by opponent dynamics and built from Sensation Modulators—tissue that senses and acts through one substrate—paired into Coordinated Action Zones routed by a body-wide broadcast. They argue that gravity, elasticity, and the body's topology and geometry do constructive cognitive work, building a self-model, a world-model, and object-directedness from the body's physics rather than assuming them as primitives. The central thesis is that 'haltability'—the active holding of an opponent equilibrium—is the architectural condition for object-directed phenomenology. They position competing accounts (sensorimotor enactivism, active inference, ecological theories) as limiting cases and propose that the nervous system integrates the body rather than commands it.

Study at a glance

Abstract

We propose the Sensation Modulating Network (SMN): the cognitive agent as the whole body, organized at every scale by opponent dynamics, built from Sensation Modulators -- tissue that senses and acts through one substrate -- paired into Coordinated Action Zones routed by a body-wide broadcast. It is an inclusive model of the body, in which gravity, elasticity, and the body's topology and geometry do constructive cognitive work. The paper is scoped to what such a body constructs at its foundation -- a self-model, a world-model in that self's frame, and object-directedness -- each built by the body's physics, not assumed as a primitive. The architecture is generative: one small kit of primitives whose morphological variations (chain, sheet, tube, layered, appendicular) construct experience by the same mechanism, an invariance shown for the self-model across body plans and scales. The central thesis: haltability -- the active holding of an opponent equilibrium -- is the architectural condition object-directed phenomenology requires; a second principle, that an object is a bundle of more than one property, carries it from felt resistance to a genuine object. A companion bench realizes each construction as a runnable, falsifiable experiment with a pre-registered order parameter and matched foil. We place the principal competing accounts -- sensorimotor enactivism, active inference, and ecological and affordance-based theories -- as limiting cases within a wider landscape, stating in each case the criterion that would tell them apart, and give systems and cognitive neuroscience its place: the nervous system as the integrating core that makes the body one, not a commander over it. On this account, the cognitivism-4E impasse reflects an incomplete architecture of the embodied agent: its resolution begins not with the brain alone but with the whole body.