---
slug: internal_signal_as_evidence
name: Internal Signal as Evidence
one_liner: "Treating an internally generated signal as direct evidence about an external state of affairs, without independent corroboration — the general error of which affect-driven inference is one species."
type: prime
schema_version: 2
status: density_v2_draft
categories: [cognitive, epistemic]
origin_domain: cognitive_science
alternate_origin_domains: [decision_theory, perception, clinical_psychology]
aliases: [signal_source_confusion, endogenous_cue_misattribution, felt_state_as_readout, internal_state_projection, uncorroborated_introspective_inference]
related: []
solution_archetypes: []
review_flags:
- "OPERATOR-DERIVED (op-05 generalization) — the proposed GENUS of `emotional_reasoning` (lift: strip the *affect* frame — 'the internal signal is an emotion' — up to any internally generated signal read as an external readout). Discovered in the op-05 pilot sweep 2026-07-03. Tier A candidate; internal-signal-as-evidence verified absent, siblings are non-affective. STATUS: HOLD pending owner keep/cut."
- "Created 2026-07-03; STUB ONLY (frontmatter + Core Idea + Notes). SI/SF/similarity are PROPOSER ESTIMATES pending triangulation. Body sections (Structural Signature onward) NOT written."
- "Phase-C action: re-similarity-check vs `emotional_reasoning` and the named siblings (proprioceptive illusion, gut-feeling investment calls, fever-as-room-temperature); confirm it is a genuine genus (covers the input AND the non-affect siblings) and not a domain instance or a restatement of the input; draw a subsumption edge emotional_reasoning→internal_signal_as_evidence + sibling edges at incorporation; sync one_liner to a v1 draft per CLAUDE.md before merge."
substrate_independence:
  composite_substrate_independence: 4
  domain_breadth: 4
  structural_abstraction: 4
  transfer_evidence: 3
  reasoning: 'The bare structure — a signal generated inside the system is treated as a direct readout of an external state, with the source of the signal collapsed into its purported referent — is a clean epistemic error form that does not depend on the signal being an emotion. It scores higher than the framed input `emotional_reasoning` because the lift strips affect, leaving a source-attribution failure that applies to proprioception, interoception, gut intuition, and any sensor-plus-inference loop (including engineered ones, where an instrument fault is read as a real reading). Breadth and abstraction sit at 4; transfer evidence is a shade lower (3) because the strongest documented cases still cluster in human cognition, and the fully mechanical instances (faulty-sensor-as-truth) are proposer-inferred rather than corpus-attested.'
similarity_to_nearest_existing_prime:
  slug: emotional_reasoning
  similarity: 0.6
structural_framed:
  label: structural
  aggregate: 0.34
  criteria: {vocab_travels: 0.7, evaluative_weight: 0.3, institutional_origin: 0.3, human_practice_bound: 0.4, import_vs_recognize: 0.3}
  rationale: 'The pattern is a structure-first inference error about the source of a signal, not a value-laden doctrine: its content is "the signal came from inside but is being read as coming from outside," which is recognized as a bare relation and travels across perception, interoception, and instrumentation. It carries mild evaluative weight (it names a *mistake*) and is somewhat human-cognition-bound in its clearest examples, which keeps it off the structural floor, but on balance it reads structural rather than framed.'
phase_b_passes_completed: []
---
# Internal Signal as Evidence

## Core Idea

Internal-signal-as-evidence is the error in which *a signal generated inside the system is treated as a direct readout of an external state of affairs*, without the independent corroboration that would distinguish "the world is thus" from "my apparatus is producing this signal." Bare structure: an agent (or instrument) has both a state of the external world and an internally generated indicator, and the failure is to collapse the second into the first — to run the inference "I am registering signal S" → "the external state that S would report is present" while skipping the check that S was actually caused by that state rather than by the internal machinery itself. The constraint stripped from the input `emotional_reasoning` is *affect*: emotional reasoning is the special case where the internal signal is a felt emotion ("I feel afraid, therefore there is danger"). Lift away "the signal is an emotion" and what remains is the general source-attribution error, of which affect is one species.

The load-bearing anatomy is a conflation of *source* with *referent*. An internal signal legitimately carries information about the world only when its generation is reliably coupled to the world; the error severs that condition and treats the signal's mere presence as its own warrant. The characteristic payoff — why the shortcut is tempting — is *speed and immediacy*: internal signals are always available, require no external instrument, and often are informative, so treating them as evidence usually works and feels self-validating. The characteristic cost is *closed-loop confirmation*: because the signal is not independently checked against the world, a signal produced by internal dynamics (a mood, a fault, an illusion) is read as an external fact, and the reading then reinforces the very state that produced it — the error is self-sealing and immune to the correction that only outside corroboration could supply.

Read structurally rather than as a cognitive-distortion label, the same move recurs wherever an internal indicator can be mistaken for an outside measurement. In *perception*, proprioceptive and vestibular illusions are read as true body position or motion when the signal was generated by the apparatus, not the world. In *decision-making under uncertainty*, a gut feeling is treated as evidence about a market or a person — the felt confidence stands in for external data. In *interoception*, a fever's internal heat is misread as the temperature of the room. These siblings are structurally unlike the affective input — a proprioceptive signal is not an emotion, a fever is not a mood — yet each is the same skeleton: an endogenous signal read as an exogenous readout, with the corroboration step omitted.

## Notes

**Provenance.** Produced by operator 05 (generalization / lift) as the proposed genus of `emotional_reasoning`, reached by stripping the affect frame — the internal signal need not be an emotion — up to any internally generated signal treated as external evidence. Surfaced in the op-05 pilot sweep on 2026-07-03. Claimed siblings: proprioceptive illusions read as body position, gut-feeling investment calls, fever misread as room temperature. Manifest tier: A (internal-signal-as-evidence verified absent; siblings deliberately non-affective).

**For owner evaluation (keep/cut).** The case FOR: the lift is clean and the siblings are convincingly non-affective, which is the strongest evidence that this is a real genus rather than `emotional_reasoning` restated — a proprioceptive illusion and a misread fever share the *structure* (endogenous signal → treated as exogenous fact) while sharing none of the *affect*, so the abstraction is doing work. It names a source-attribution error that the corpus does not currently hold. The specific RISKS Kurt should weigh: (1) **restatement of the input** — similarity to `emotional_reasoning` is ~0.6; keep only if the non-affect siblings are judged genuinely covered and not merely gestured at. (2) **alias / overlap with existing bias primes** — check against any `confirmation_bias`, `misattribution`, or `introspection_illusion` prime; the boundary is that this prime is specifically about *signal-source confusion* (inside read as outside), not about selective evidence-seeking. (3) **domain-instance risk on the mechanical end** — the "faulty instrument read as a true reading" reach is proposer-inferred; if it doesn't survive scrutiny the prime is more human-cognition-bound than the SI estimate suggests. Sharp keep/cut question: *is "internal signal mistaken for external readout" a genus the corpus wants above `emotional_reasoning`, or is emotional reasoning the only instance it cares to name?*

**At incorporation.** Re-run similarity against `emotional_reasoning` (the input) plus any `misattribution`, `confirmation_bias`, `introspection_illusion`, or perception/illusion prime to confirm no collapse. Draw a subsumption edge `emotional_reasoning` → `internal_signal_as_evidence` and sibling edges to any proprioception/interoception primes. Missing-edge note: if the corpus later adds a `sensor_fault` or measurement-error prime it may sit as a mechanical sibling. Write a v1 draft and sync the one_liner across v1 and v2 per CLAUDE.md before merge.
