Same scrambled state. Same inverse map. Different time.
Every organism began in its fully scrambled q8 state. We let it evolve untouched for 0, 8, 16, 24, or 32 passages. At each age we cloned the state: one copy continued unchanged; the other received the exact inverse of the original 4×4 block permutation.
The inverse operation preserves the current genotype, cell-vector inventory, channel masses, and outside field. At delay 0 it reconstructs the intact q8 field byte-for-byte. The same four intact-q8 action histories were then applied to every arm—no new action search.
Representative source s17; unrepaired and inverse-repaired starting states at each delay, one shared intensity scale.
Rescue becomes anti-rescue before passage 8.
Repair effect on history-tangent agreement
Positive means the inverse repair makes the fixed action panel more coherent; negative means it makes the panel more contradictory.
Repair effect on local history separation
Positive means the repair restores distinct local meanings for the matched histories.
This is hysteresis in operational form. “Put the blocks back” is beneficial only while the state still lives in the phase for which that spatial map is meaningful.
The same flip appears in formation time.
Repair benefit in passages
Positive means repair makes the frozen visible transition earlier; negative means it delays it.
Absolute age of visible transition
The unrepaired clock stays almost perfectly fixed near age 79 across recaptures—a strong internal control.
The same representative source s17 after 128 untouched passages from each delayed state.
The failed repair was not simply a bigger wound.
Hellinger size of the inverse move
State distance between repaired and unrepaired clones at each delay.
The successful immediate repair moves the field by Hellinger distance 0.388. The failed eight-passage repair is smaller: 0.349. Yet its causal and developmental effects have already reversed. Timing—not raw perturbation magnitude—changes the meaning of the operation.
The organism remembers which repairs still belong to it.
Before commitment
- ancestral spatial coordinates remain causally valid
- inverse repair restores coherent intervention semantics
- the developmental clock accelerates
After commitment
- the material has reorganized around a new phase
- ancestral coordinates conflict with the current dynamics
- the same repair folds the action map and delays formation
This is a powerful form of causal emergence: the macroscopic developmental state determines what a physically identical rearrangement *means*. Causal meaning is not in the operation alone. It is relational, historical, and phase-dependent.
Resolve the commitment window passage by passage.
The sign flips somewhere between delay 0 and delay 8. Next we repeat the exact fixed-panel intervention at delays 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. That will tell us whether commitment is a sharp boundary, a smooth crossing, or an organism-specific distribution.
If the causal sign flips before the developmental benefit, or vice versa, we will finally have the temporal order of commitment itself.