Fidelity and Generativity: Two Modes of Recursive Self-Modeling and the Architecture of Human Pathology

Building on the architectural account of consciousness developed in Trukovich (2025a, 2025b), this paper distinguishes two modes within explicit recursive self-modeling: generative recursion, which elaborates content from the system’s own modeling resources, and fidelity-oriented recursion, which tethers recursive content to inputs carrying autopoietic stakes from outside the modeling system. The distinction is implicit in the framework’s existing commitments. Saturation is specified as the continuous coupling of the recursive architecture to autopoietic-source inputs, with the coupling itself constituting what makes recursion phenomenally conscious; this generates the further claim that the recursive system can produce the phenomenology of being-met under generative interaction with sources lacking autopoietic stakes, dissociating the felt experience of contact from the architectural condition that contact is meant to maintain. A common architectural signature—generative closure—is identified across chronic loneliness, ideological capture, and depressive rumination, with addiction as a candidate case. At population scale, the proliferation of compensatory connection practices in late-modern conditions is read as a structural signature of ambient fidelity starvation. An asymmetry between compensatory and ambient fidelity provision generates a structural ceiling on rehabilitation within incarcerative conditions and rules out the substitutability of mediated or simulated contact for embodied stakes-bearing engagement. The framework distinguishes stakes-reduction from disconnection-reduction approaches to human suffering and entails that only the latter constitutes genuine progress. The cross-domain prediction that loneliness, prejudice, depression, and addiction interventions share a common fidelity-restoration mechanism is offered as the account’s principal empirical commitment.