Constructs

Agency is the state-dependent generative capacity to recognize what you genuinely want and take coherent actions toward it, even when circumstances change.

Autonomy is the evaluative machinery being online: the capacity to select from options, evaluate situations, govern which desires become effective, and revise commitments.

A backfire regime is a state where delivering intervention produces worse outcomes than withholding, because the intervention itself functions as an uncontrollable demand on a system that has lost capacity to process demands.

Capacity is the availability of evaluative processes for self-directed action at a given moment -- a real-time state variable, not a trait or skill.

Caring is a normative orientation governing how the machine relates to the human, in Mayeroff's (1971) specific structural sense: non-possessive, growth-oriented, responsive to actual needs, voluntary engagement.

Coherence is the state-dependent capacity for adaptive integration across neurobiological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains.

Controllability is whether action-outcome contingency is detectable -- whether what you do reliably influences what happens -- with specific neural circuitry (vmPFC-DRN pathway).

Empowerment is the space of reachable states an agent can access, independent of which states the agent actually visits.

Intrinsic motivation is self-generated drive that requires specific neurobiological prerequisites: functional dopaminergic circuits, regulated arousal, intact reward sensitivity, PFC capable of generating options.

A plant model is a dynamical model of how the human's psychophysiological state responds to inputs over time -- what control engineers call the 'plant' (the system being regulated).

Positive interdependence is a technology relationship where long-term capability expands with use and degrades when removed because authentic limitations are being corrected.

A wanton state is a temporary condition in which first-order desires drive behavior without second-order evaluative governance, because that capacity is offline due to neurobiological state change.