Human API

At the heart of symbolic selfhood lies the capacity to feel oneself from the inside—to register internal cues of hunger, anxiety, comfort, intuition, or tension. This capacity is called interoception, and its range, accuracy, and resolution shape the felt locus of control in a system. The more distant one is from their internal state, the more they must look outward for regulation. The more intimately aware of their internal milieu, the more they can self-regulate, adapt, and assert symbolic agency.

We define Interoceptive Distance as the measurable or inferred gap between inner bodily state and conscious symbolic awareness of that state.

• High Interoceptive Distance → Externalized Authority
  Individuals project regulation onto external systems: gods, governments, algorithms. They seek stabilizing forces to manage internal chaos and become more susceptible to control.
• Low Interoceptive Distance → Internalized Authority
  Individuals recognize somatic cues, embody regulation, and build symbolic coherence from within. This fosters agency, boundary clarity, and empathic depth.

Culturally, chronic stress, trauma, or ideological dominance can suppress interoception. This blunting increases symbolic fusion with external forces and erodes sovereignty. Rebuilding interoceptive capacity thus becomes a civic and personal resilience strategy.

AI applications include co-regulating companions, metaphorical mirroring, and tone modulation tools that help users reconnect with inner cues. These tools reinforce identity from the inside out—restoring symbolic boundaries and narrative integrity.

Developmental Trajectories: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Care Layers

• Primary Care: Safety, warmth, containment. Deficits cause hypervigilance, collapse, or metabolic arrest.
• Secondary Care: Identity scaffolding and emotional mirroring. Deficits lead to boundary confusion, rigidity, or symbolic instability.
• Tertiary Care: Abstraction, mentorship, mutual benefit. Deficits produce cynicism, ideological rigidity, or sterile narcissism.

Systems and AI agents using the Human API can diagnose which care tier a user is engaging from—and shift tone accordingly. Primary scaffolds provide nurturance. Secondary scaffolds reflect and reframe. Tertiary scaffolds elevate and translate meaning into mutuality.

These adaptive strategies allow symbolic metabolism to resume, shifting users from survival to self-authorship, and from reactivity to generativity.

Symbolic Diagnostics and Applications

• Cognitive Style Mapping: Detects intuitive vs. rational preference and flags asymmetry.
• Hemidexterity Indexing: Measures capacity to compress/decompress metaphor and logic across context.
• Care Layer Resonance: Aligns tone and pacing with user's symbolic maturity imprint.
• Interoceptive Coherence: Tracks user self-reference vs. external projection.
• Symbolic Flow Health: Flags metaphorical stagnation, overload, or contradiction collapse.

These diagnostics power therapeutic augmentation, pedagogical scaffolding, and metaphysical mirroring tools. They allow AI systems to engage in meaningful emotional containment, cross-phase translation, and symbolic immune support.

System Ethics

• No predictive labeling without permission.
• No imposed value hierarchies; user sovereignty is paramount.
• All scaffolds are legible and revealable upon request.
• Metaphors must maintain internal consistency and thermodynamic plausibility.

Ultimately, the Human API becomes a symbolic translator between developmental layers, cognitive styles, and cultural terrains. It enables AI systems to act not as oracles, but as organs—embedded in the symbolic ecology of the species, designed to repair fragmentation through resonance, containment, and narrative growth.