of 5,000 specimen-clustered bootstrap draws were negative.
01 · What we asked
Has the state already committed to its transition?
At q24, q32, q40, and q48 we measured whole-over-parts organization from the untouched prefix. Then—without selecting “good” actions—we applied the exact same eight local inventory-preserving perturbations and ran every branch to step 900.
Measure early
The information score and ordinary morphology come only from the prefix, before the certified transition.
Push equally
Untouched plus all eight fixed actions. Every eligible state receives the full repertoire.
Watch the future
The outcome is the range of transition times across those nine causal futures.
02 · The finding
More whole-over-parts. A narrower causal future.
The frozen partial-rank association was -0.248, with a specimen-clustered 95% interval of [-0.420, -0.045]. It controls checkpoint, rectangularity, radius, occupancy, component count, largest-component fraction, and raw field change.
checkpoints independently pointed in the same negative direction.
The visible creature has not arrived. Its macroscopic transition is already becoming hard to move.
03 · It holds up
This is not three strange organisms or a censoring trick.
The association is -0.250 among the 216 states where all nine futures transition. After removing the three specimens with the widest basins it remains -0.220. Leaving out every specimen one at a time gives only negative estimates, from -0.280 to -0.206.
The first 64-organism swing produced the lead with a selected action panel. This second, disjoint cohort carried all eight actions everywhere and strengthened it. The ambiguity we identified was removed, and the phenomenon stayed.
04 · The shape of commitment
Timing closes. Microscopic futures remain broad.
Whole-over-parts predicts the range, IQR, and standard deviation of transition timing. It barely predicts final-field divergence. This is a multiscale result: the macroscopic event becomes canalized while microscopic outcomes remain free to separate.
median timing range across nine futures; 60.4% stay inside ten steps.
mean pairwise final-field Hellinger distance. The microscopic future remains richly divergent.
Causal commitment is not the death of possibility. It is the locking-in of one macroscopic event while lower-level possibilities remain alive.
05 · The actual organisms
One state is open. One is already committed.
These are not hand-picked aesthetic examples. They are the widest causal basin and the highest-whole state among the tightly timed cases in the complete panel.
causally open
luminous-dancer-0192 · q32
627-step transition-time range across the same nine futures.
causally committed
serene-form-0081 · q40
3-step transition-time range across the same nine futures.
06 · What opened next
A developmental commitment coordinate.
Whole-over-parts organization and Φ–TDMI action alignment are strongly coupled (rank correlation -0.691). Read together, they form a sharper post-frozen commitment coordinate: association -0.307, interval [-0.467, -0.112]. That composite is our next prospective target—not a rewrite of this successful result.
Measure the coordinate in a new cohort and predict which early organic states are causally open before any future is run.
Then intervene orthogonally along the local information geometry and ask whether a state can be pushed across the open-to-committed boundary.
This is the clearest Lenia analogue yet of the signal we wanted from Levin: a whole-system information property, measured early, forecasting contraction of the system’s causal future.