The Human Experience System: A Transdisciplinary Model of Embodied Human Experience for Clinical Science and Computational Therapeutics

Abstract

Current models of human experience used in clinical science — the biopsychosocial model (Engel, 1977), categorical diagnostic systems (DSM-5-TR; APA, 2022; ICD-11; WHO, 2019), and dimensional frameworks (RDoC; Insel et al., 2010) — share four critical absences: no model treats the body as the primary interface through which the entire system is known; no model provides a formal mechanism of interaction between its components; no model includes temporal depth as a constitutive dimension; and no model accounts for the role of intelligent technology as a participant in the system it observes. A fifth absence, addressed in this version, is equally consequential: no model describes how the system develops — how the layers emerge during critical periods, how the conditions of development determine the predictive architecture that generates adult suffering, and how prevention can operate at the developmental source. This paper introduces the Human Experience System (HES), a transdisciplinary model that addresses all five absences. The HES describes a person as a complex adaptive system of ten interacting layers — somatic, predictive, affective, neural, memory, relational, ecological, generational, technological, and temporal — experienced through the body, organized by prediction, shaped across multiple timescales, and changed through the same embodied process that assesses it. The model is grounded in seven major research programs: constructed emotion theory (Barrett), predictive processing and active inference (Friston), primary affect systems (Panksepp), somatic markers and the bodily self (Damasio), neuropsychoanalysis (Solms), the entangled brain framework (Pessoa), and memory reconsolidation (Kandel, Nader, Schiller, Ecker). Eight foundational claims are advanced, generating ten testable empirical predictions. The model is presented as domain-general: the same ten layers describe human experience across behavioral health, chronic pain, neurological disorders, geriatric care, substance use treatment, and primary care. The HES provides the theoretical foundation for the Human Experience Framework (HEF), a classification system that organizes human suffering into sixteen territories of characteristic nervous system organization, and the Cathexis Somatic Ontology (CSO) — registered as CXSO on BioPortal, where the acronym CSO was unavailable — a computational vocabulary for structured somatic data. Together, these form a complete intellectual architecture: theory (HES), classification (HEF), and computation (CSO). The HES is published under CC BY 4.0 — permitting commercial use and derivative work with attribution — so that adoption, testing, and extension across clinical disciplines face no licensing barrier. The complete framework is available free at https://cathexis.health/science