not delight

Braitenberg's observers reported delight — charmed recognition that something so simple could seem alive, a demonstration completing itself in a moment of pleased surprise. An object that never lets the recognition complete does not produce that. What accumulates instead is a low, sustained vigilance that does not tire into indifference so much as settle into something nearer grief: the cost of a perceptual apparatus doing exactly what it evolved to do, correctly and indefinitely, in front of something that will never once confirm it was right to try. This is the affective form of the gap, and the reason attention without closure is not a neutral description.