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Emotions are often regarded as subjective psychological phenomena opposed to rational cognition. This paper proposes a different interpretation: emotions are the regulatory architecture that enables adaptive intelligence under conditions of uncertainty, survival constraints, and ontic drift. Within the Structural Descent Framework (SDF), intelligence is defined as the rate at which a cognitive system reduces inadequacy between its internal model and reality. However, successful descent requires dynamic regulation of exploration, stability, mismatch detection, gain control, and survival pressure. We show that emotional states can be formally represented as evaluative functions operating on these regulatory variables together with memory, identity, social interaction, and ontic orientation. The framework develops a five-layer cognitive architecture linking regulator dynamics, memory integration, identity formation, social interaction, and universal orientation. Primitive emotions arise from survival regulators, while complex emotions emerge from memory and self-model evaluation. Social emotions regulate multi-agent coordination and conflict resolution, distinguishing productive non-antagonistic contradiction from destructive antagonistic contradiction. At larger scales, collective emotional dynamics support the emergence of ethical norms, resource conservation, and diversity preservation necessary for sustained structural exploration. Extending the analysis further, we interpret civilization as a distributed intelligence whose institutions function as cognitive organs for memory, inference, and structural revision. Artificial intelligence then appears as a newly emerging organ capable of accelerating structural descent through rapid inference, structural adaptation, and optimization of regulatory dynamics. Higher-order universal emotions such as awe, wonder, beauty, and meaning arise when agents orient their cognitive architecture toward large-scale coherence in reality. The resulting framework provides a unified mathematical account of emotional regulation across individual cognition, social interaction, civilization, and artificial intelligence. Emotions, on this view, are not irrational disturbances but necessary control mechanisms enabling intelligence to sustain adaptive descent under survival constraints. This reinterpretation suggests that ethical norms, cooperative institutions, and future artificial systems may all be understood as emergent structures supporting continued descent toward greater adequacy with reality.