PhronesisWe apply the Displacement Framework to Cotard's Delusion (Walking Corpse Syndrome / le délire des négations, Cotard 1880), formalizing it as W_cotard — a nihilistic wrong attractor in which global affective anaesthesia is resolved by the nihilistic belief: the complete absence of emotional and interoceptive responsiveness to the world is explained by death, non-existence, or organ loss.
The embodied aliveness ground state S⁰_existence is defined across four dimensions: affective responsiveness to the world, interoceptive signals of being alive, temporal self-continuity, and presence — the configuration that frontal and parietal hypometabolism (FDG-PET evidence: vegetative-state-level metabolic depression in florid Cotard) destroys. W_cotard is formalized as Cotard's Delusion being the global version of Capgras Syndrome: while Capgras involves face-specific affect disconnection resolved by the impostor belief, Cotard involves complete global affective disconnection resolved by the nihilistic belief.
Both are rational responses to irrational percepts (Maher's anomalous experience hypothesis applied at global scale). The nihilism spectrum progresses from organ denial through death belief to non-existence to the immortality variant — the logical completion when death belief is confronted with the evidence of continued biological function. Nine formal propositions cover: S⁰_existence definition (P1), W_cotard global affective anaesthesia architecture (P2), the rational-irrational paradox and Cotard-as-global-Capgras (P3), three-stage progression from germination through blooming to chronic stabilization (P4), the immortality variant as secondary wrong attractor with modus tollens structure (P5), neurobiological substrate including parietal hypometabolism and vegetative-state-level FDG-PET (P6), depersonalization-derealization as partial W_cotard (P7), ECT as the most evidence-based return path (P8), and Cotard as the limit case of existential displacement — maximum D(ξ_existence) (P9).