Instincts Over Map
How one shared world map lets ancient instincts drive feelings in the modern world
Feelings are a strange blind spot. We spend most of our lives being pushed around by them, pick up a few folk tricks for getting them to behave, and never get anything like a theory of where they come from or what they are doing.
Anger is a good example. By adulthood, most people can recognize when it is rising, feel how it distorts what they see, watch it spill over onto the wrong targets, and notice how it eventually burns itself out. You get cut off in traffic, curse at the other driver, carry that heat into the next conversation, snap at someone who did nothing, and ten minutes later apologize, half‑embarrassed, because you can see the contamination. You know, at some vague level, that the first event colored the second, and that the second person was just standing in the wrong place.
No one hands you that manual. I do not remember being told that anger is usually triggered by a perceived injustice, that it pushes you toward retaliation often out of proportion to the original slight, or that once active, it will happily attach itself to whatever person or object is nearby. We infer that structure slowly, from the inside, by watching ourselves make the same moves in different situations and noticing which ones feel similar.
It is odd that we leave it there. We are willing to talk as if anger, fear, jealousy, shame, and the rest are basic ingredients in an inner palette. Their behavior is obviously more structured than that. Anger does not simply glow in the background. It shows up under particular conditions, tries to make you take particular kinds of actions, and then, once some invisible accounting is satisfied, lets go. Anxiety is the same. It does not just mean “I think something bad might happen.” It is very picky about which bets you have open, how much control you think you have, and what you are currently not doing.
We treat those patterns as quirks of personality. “That’s just how I am with deadlines.” “He’s got a short fuse.” Underneath, there is a shared shape: similar triggers, similar cascades, similar ways out. We behave as if we had all reverse‑engineered the same small collection of programs, but never bother to write down what those programs might be.
Instincts in the wrong world
To see why any of this needs explaining, it helps to imagine a simpler life. Picture an animal with nothing but instincts: prewritten responses tied directly to certain patterns at the senses. If the grass rustles this way, freeze. If that smell gets stronger, follow it. If a nearby infant makes that sound, move toward it and pick it up. There is no inner commentary, no simulation, just “if this, then that” wired straight from senses to muscles.
This works as long as the world stays close to the one that shaped those rules. Moths navigated for millions of years by a single bright object extremely far away. A point of light in the sky is a reliable guide. Keep it at a fixed angle and you move in a straight line. Under street lamps and porch lights, the same rule drives them into tight spirals they can never escape. Nothing in the old code says “unless the light source is one foot away and attached to a wall.”
Predators in cages show the same mismatch. A tiger carries circuitry tuned for stalkable terrain: open spaces, brush, rocks, scent trails that go somewhere. In an enclosure it still paces, checks the edges for gaps, tests the air for prey that will never appear. Metal bars are processed as an unusually regular kind of tree. The instinct never sees the global picture “this space is finite and inescapable.” It was never asked to.
Our own environment has been mutating rapidly for a while. Drives that made sense for small bands of humans in a fairly stable ecology now have to operate over emails, dating apps, and whatever else we have built this decade. It is unlikely that evolution had time to add bespoke instincts for “scrolling until 2 am” or “waiting for a college portal to update,” but whatever sits underneath our feelings still reacts to them in ways that are at least vaguely appropriate. That calls for a translator.
Conjunctive scripts
The structure is clearer if you think about one of Philosophy 101’s more annoying lessons. “Knowledge” was analyzed as “justified true belief.” The phrase sounds profound until you unpack it and realize it contains no definitional content. Each term—belief, truth, justification—has its own story elsewhere. “Justified true belief” is no more than a conjunction of those three pointers, which you must figure out individually.
Instincts look a lot like that. The testosterone system probably does not contain a literal sentence, but one of its rules is close to, “if you win a difficult battle for status that you did not expect to win, increase baseline.” Battle, status, difficult, and unexpected are all unpacked somewhere else. The rule itself is just an AND‑gate over those conditions.
Anger fits the same template. It follows some rule like “if another agent blocks one of your goals, then avenge.” The concepts of “agent” and “goal” are not stored in the anger circuit. Your general model of the world does that work. That map ends up with the same landmarks either way—who can act, who is blocking whom, what counts as winning—whether you grew up on a savannah or in a classroom. The anger rule only cares that all three are lit up at once.
You can run this pattern across most familiar feelings. Jealousy is something like “if a valued mate invests in a rival.” Shame is “if your apparent rank drops sharply in front of many observers.” The details are debatable, but the form is not. These are not raw blobs. They are little conjunctions over more basic representations.
Two systems, one map
Once you see feelings as the visible tips of small conjunctive rules, a two‑layer picture more or less forces itself on you. There has to be a general system that builds and maintains a map of the world and a separate, older system that watches that map for its own favorite patterns.
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis asserts that as agents become more competent, they converge on a shared internal geometry that captures the world’s regularities. The layout of that geometry is not arbitrary. There will be directions in which “more people are watching” lies, regions where “close kin” cluster, basins where “your own future prospects” sit, ridges corresponding to “things that can hurt you,” and so on. Any creature that has to predict and act in the same universe will eventually carve out something like this.
If you are not convinced there is literally one best map, the two-layer model still mostly goes through. You can flip the order. Instead of a shared geometry that instincts learn to read, start from a fixed wiring diagram of instincts and treat that as the attractor. Development then relaxes around those prewired nodes—self, offspring, status, threat—into whatever local shape lets the scripts fire in roughly the right places. Either way, you end up with a learned map plus a small, stubborn network sitting on top of it, watching.
Evolution can use that shared structure. It does not need to specify a full wiring diagram for a cortex. It only needs to mark a few anchor regions and wire relations between them. Some of those relations are straightforward. Connect “offspring” to “protect even at high cost.” Connect “symmetrical face” to “approach and invest.” Connect “prolonged sameness” to “mild aversion.” Others are more layered, like the anger and jealousy rules above, but the scheme is the same. You get a general map for free through learning, and a small fixed network of instincts bolted onto it.
That separate network is the instinct layer. It does not see raw light or sound. It sees your world map. It monitors specific regions and combinations: offspring and threat, self and group, effort and future payoff. When one of its rules sees its condition satisfied, it sends a brief, coarse signal back into the system to that map at a specific spot. That spot is what we call a feeling.
Remote writes
From the inside, we never see the instinct layer. We only see what happens when it decides to act. A feeling is what it looks like when a script in that layer writes into certain reserved regions of the map and the downstream consequences ripple through.
The write has a distinctive signature. Attention narrows to a subset of possibilities. Certain thoughts become sticky while others stop occurring to you. Parts of the body light up or go numb. Actions in one family become easy to take and actions in another family suddenly feel impossible. We label these packages—anger, fear, shame, relief, dread, curiosity—based on the particular pattern of bias they introduce.
The important detail is that the thing that fired is not local to the bit of mind that noticed the feeling. It lives elsewhere in the instinct layer, watching a different patch of the map over a longer window. When whatever pattern it cares about crosses its threshold, it briefly writes to the feeling surface and then goes back to scanning. From your side it looks like “suddenly feeling off for no reason.” From its side it was the end of a long, quiet accumulation.
Because the communication is one‑way, we are always working backwards. A feeling arrives, and we start proposing causes. It must be the email, or the look someone gave us, or random brain chemistry. The script never tells us what clause it matched. We only see the output and guess. Sometimes we guess well. Sometimes we attach an honest warning to the wrong situation and then wonder why nothing we do there makes it go away.
Anxiety as unfinished work
Anxiety is the clearest case where this model excels and others flounder. The standard gloss is that anxious people overestimate danger or underestimate coping ability. That sometimes happens, but it misses the shape of the feeling itself. Anxiety is not a generic sense that the world is unsafe. It is obsessed with a very particular question. “Is there something important I could be doing right now that I am not doing?”
A crude spec for the anxiety script might be: if the map says that this has a large effect on your future standing or survival, and you could still take actions to improve the outcome, and you are not taking those actions, then light up the anxiety region and keep it lit.
This explains why unfinished schoolwork or an unsent application can occupy so much more preoccupation than a much larger but uncontrollable risk. You will worry more about a looming deadline you could be working on than about cardiovascular disease. The script does not care about the absolute size of the danger. It is not tracking how bad the outcome could be in theory, only how much it matters to you and how obviously you’re avoiding work on it.
It also explains a familiar relief. The moment you finally submit the application, or send the email, or start the draft in a serious way, a surprising amount of anxiety evaporates. The outcome is no less uncertain. Your future is still at stake. But condition two, you have meaningful actions left, has moved sharply toward false. You did what you could. The rule stops firing.
There is another way to satisfy it, which is to lower the stakes. If your map really comes to represent “this exam is not a fork in the road,” or “this job does not actually decide my life trajectory,” then condition one weakens and the script has less to complain about. This rarely happens through slogans. It happens when your world model gets enough counterexamples—failed exams and still‑decent lives, job losses and better outcomes—that it moves that domain out of the “controls everything” region.
Loopback anxiety
Where this architecture outcompetes is when you try to get rid of anxiety by declaring it wrong. From the script’s point of view, that move changes the map in a particular way. There is still a domain it thinks is high‑stakes. There are still actions it thinks you are not taking. On top of that, there is now a new fact. There is an ongoing alarm in the system, and the part in charge is doing nothing about it.
Each time you say “this is just my anxiety acting up” and then carry on as before, you teach your map something new. There is a loud alarm in the system and the part in charge routinely ignores it. The anxiety script that used to compare “task” to “work done” now also compares “alarm” to “response,” and sees the same mismatch. What began as a push to start the draft comes back as a push to do something, anything, about the feeling of alarm you keep ignoring.
That is the loop many people report when certain styles of therapy go wrong. You are taught to label your anxiety as a distortion, a misfire, a leftover instinct that does not fit the modern world. You learn to notice it and to tell yourself it is not about anything real. None of that changes the fact that your map still tags a set of projects, relationships, or risks as important and unaddressed. The script keeps firing. Now it also sees that the alarm itself has become a problem you are trying, unsuccessfully, to suppress.
Only a model with a one‑way script like this predicts that trying to argue with the feeling while leaving its condition true will make it worse. From the inside, it reads as a mysterious escalation. From the outside, it is exactly what you would expect. A watchdog that was already worried about one open door has just noticed that the siren is blaring and you have put on noise‑canceling headphones.
This is not an argument against all cognitive therapy. Many techniques do the opposite of this. They run experiments, change behavior, adjust goals, and thereby alter the map so that the script’s condition stops being true. The failure mode is more specific. If you stay at the level of telling yourself the feeling is a miscalculation and never touch the structure underneath, you have given the script new evidence that the system is not taking problems seriously. Of course it turns up the volume.
Understanding the scripts
The only way out of these runaway conditions is to move a level down and extract the underlying rules. Once you are working with the actual if–then statements, you can see what would count as a genuine fix. “If there is work you could do on X that matters and you are not doing it, fire anxiety” rather than the vague “I am anxious again.”
In the anxiety case, there are really only three levers. You can do the work, so the “you are not doing anything about it” condition fails. You can make a clean decision to abandon the domain, so the “this really controls your future” condition fails. Or you can discover, through experience rather than wishful thinking, that some other path matters more, so the whole link between that domain and your future weakens. All of those are changes to the map. None of them require convincing the script of anything. They just stop feeding it the pattern it was built to notice.
The same move works elsewhere. If you see shame as “my brain abusing me,” you will resist it. If you see it as “if I am visibly downgraded in front of many people, shrink and repair,” you can decide when that response is appropriate and when the audience is imaginary. If “social anxiety” leads you to open an anonymous burner to ask a question online, you are already acting as if you knew the script was “only fire if my reputation is actually on the line.” You are removing the “my name is attached to this” condition so the alarm won’t fire, instead of refining the post until it is unassailable under your own identity.
Once you start looking, you find that most of the heavy feelings can be turned into these little scripts. Some of the scripts still make sense in the modern world. Some are working off broken assumptions about how replaceable groups are or how final a failure is. In both cases, the instinct layer is doing exactly what it was built to do. The work is all on the map side.
Tomorrow, how a single map can hide more than a single self.