Persona, Ego, Shadow, and Self: A Map of the Soul Framework for Proto-Emotional Homeostasis in AI

Abstract

I present a compact, testable architecture that endows learning agents with continuous proto-emotional dynamics and interpretable modulators (Persona, Ego, Shadow, Self). The design grounds these modulators in a computational interpretation of Jung’s Map of the Soul, mapping each archetype to a differentiable control that modulates policy selection via a bounded, low-dimensional affect vector. I describe concrete modular implementations, a staged experimental program (toy domains → multi-agent/social tasks → nonstationary transfer), baselines, ablations, and reproducible evaluation metrics.