Apply the same exact repair at every developmental age.
We filled the missing interval from passage 1 through 7 across the same 39 organic Flow Lenia systems. At every age, the state was cloned. One copy continued scrambled; the other received the exact inverse of the original 4×4 spatial permutation. Both then faced the same four fixed future histories.
variable: when the inverse map is applied
Representative organism s04. Each pair begins from the same evolved scrambled state; the right image receives the same inverse 4×4 block map.
Birth, one passage, two passages—then the causal meaning flips.
Causal coherence restored by repair
Positive: repair aligns the effects of matched future histories. Negative: the same repair makes those effects less coherent.
Local history separation restored
Positive: the repair restores distinct local meanings for the two history conditions. This second information-geometric readout crosses slightly later.
The ancestral arrangement has a short causal lifetime. By passage 3, restoring it no longer restores the organism's action-world. It conflicts with the organization the system has already built.
The morphological clock turns in the same neighborhood.
Benefit to visible-transition timing
Positive: repair advances the frozen visible transition. Negative: it delays it. This readout is much noisier than the causal geometry.
The mean timing benefit crosses near passage 1.96. Individual transition times are noisy, so its bootstrap interval is wide (0.62–7.62). The clean result is the causal crossover; the visible-development clock points to the same early commitment neighborhood rather than defining it precisely.
Commitment is distributed—but almost all of it happens by passage three.
Individual causal crossover
Median 1.60 passages. All 39 organisms eventually cross. Thirty-six cross by passage 3; the remaining three by passage 4.
- 2 began with a nonpositive repair effect
- 14 more crossed during passage 1
- 12 crossed during passage 2
- 8 crossed during passage 3
- 3 crossed during passage 4
All sixteen source groups
Each dot is one source-group mean; dot radius reflects its 1–4 represented organisms. Fourteen of sixteen group means cross by passage 3. The two later groups cross at 3.68 and 5.25.
The operation's size does not explain the sign reversal.
Physical size of repaired versus unrepaired state
Hellinger distance caused by the inverse map. This is a magnitude chart, so zero-crossing is not applicable.
The move is actually smaller at passage 2 (0.307) than at birth (0.388). Passage 2 and passage 3 have virtually identical perturbation size—0.307 versus 0.307—yet the causal effect falls from +0.008 to −0.090. Across organisms, magnitude–effect correlations remain weak (−0.21 to +0.26).
Development is a change in causal compatibility.
Before passage 2
- the ancestral spatial arrangement still belongs to the system
- restoring it re-aligns counterfactual futures
- material repair and causal repair point the same way
After passage 3
- the system has built organization around a new state
- the ancestral arrangement has become causally foreign
- physical restoration now damages the action-world
This is an experimentally controlled commitment window in an emergent Flow Lenia developmental process. It is exactly the kind of macroscopic, history-sensitive causal organization we were looking for: the same microstate rearrangement changes sign because the whole has changed phase.
Can we move the commitment boundary?
Now that we know where commitment lives, we can intervene on it rather than merely observe it. The strongest next move is to slow, accelerate, or reverse commitment with information-directed control—and ask whether shifting this two-passage boundary predictably shifts the later birth of the organism.
That would connect early causal plasticity to later morphology directly: not “a score rose before an event,” but “we moved the loss of causal plasticity, and the organism's developmental transition moved with it.”