Emotion Flow and Consciousness as Signals of Filtration Balance

This paper presents a constraint-based account of consciousness and affect grounded in filtration under entropy pressure. It argues that conscious experience is not an optional feature of complex cognition, but an unavoidable consequence of persistent systems managing unresolved uncertainty. When filtration cannot fully resolve or export incoming entropy, recursive self-monitoring becomes necessary, and the internal registration of this pressure is experienced as feeling. The paper explains flow, negative emotion, depression, and love as distinct filtration regimes, including both forced and chosen deferral of unresolved structure. It provides explicit exclusion and falsifiability conditions, reframing the hard problem of consciousness as a question of necessity rather than metaphysics. The account is substrate-independent and applies to biological, artificial, and collective systems operating under constraint.