Affective Collapse Under Causal Closure

Canonical reference version. This version 1.0 is the stabilized reference. This note is intended as a citable entry point for the corpus. Extended discussion, examples, and implications are developed in the companion documents. Affective Collapse Under Causal Closure is a short research note proposing a regime-level account of why childhood joy becomes inaccessible with maturation. The central claim is that maturity does not reduce hedonic capacity, it makes experience self-explanatory too early for it to reorganize into an event. The note formalizes Z, a control-level abstraction capturing cumulative causal closure and state-dependent monitoring, and provides a compact, falsifiable framework for interpreting nostalgia, adult “fragments”, and entry failure. Version 1.0 replaces the earlier 0.9 minimal release with minor stylistic corrections and paper-formatted figures, while remaining fully backward compatible with Box 1 and the prediction labels (A1–D1). It contains the minimal claim, the operational entry constraints, and a labeled falsification set for unambiguous citation.