Major discovery · organism-relative intervention
Before the organism / swing 01
The state turns. Then it becomes harder to steer.
A single founder choice still sends Flow Lenia organisms down different morphological futures before and at their own structural information turn. Two passages later, that leverage falls by 12.3%.
The information event is not a needle-shaped maximum. It is the closing edge of a broader causal-plasticity window.
01 / Intervention
Same action. Three organism-relative moments.
Each organism supplied its own structural information peak from untouched prefix data. At three fixed moments we forced exactly one founder identity, then released the system into matched stochastic futures.
Before
Two passages before the organism’s own structural turn.
At the turn
The prefix-only local peak in estimator validity, MIP partition change, and effective-rank change.
After
Two passages after the same turn. Everything else remains matched.
The causal question: how far apart do the four founder choices push the later organism, under the same future background?
02 / Result
Not a spike. A plateau, then a drop.
The symmetric “peak beats both neighbors” test did not clear its interval. Looking at the fixed timings separately reveals why: before and peak are nearly identical, while after is distinctly lower.
Peak → after
+0.0045 more morphological fanout at the turn. Family bootstrap 95% interval [+0.0005, +0.0087]. Positive in 15/19 organisms.
Before → peak
Essentially flat: -0.0003, interval [-0.0032, +0.0026]. The system is already plastic before the information turn.
03 / Dynamics
The action difference grows into different forms.
Field fanout is the average pairwise distance among the four founder-action futures. The three curves start together; the after-turn futures progressively separate less.
By passages 3–12, mean field fanout is 0.03684 before, 0.03654 at the turn, and 0.03206 after.
04 / Specificity
The identities remain steerable. The form becomes rigid.
If the action simply stopped affecting founder composition, the morphological drop would be trivial. It did not: composition fanout remains similar—and if anything trends slightly upward after the turn.
Composition stays open
Peak minus after composition fanout: -0.0002, interval [-0.0024, +0.0020].
Morphology closes
The same founder identities still differ compositionally, but those differences have less leverage over the organism’s later spatial form.
05 / Population
This is not one photogenic creature.
Peak-minus-after morphological fanout for every organism. Orange points favor the commitment-boundary pattern; blue points run against it.
06 / Synthesis
Prediction and intervention now point to the same developmental event.
The state forecasts a turn
In the prior fresh prospective panel, the prefix-only structural peak predicted a local reorganization of the later future repertoire.
We intervene around it
The same founder action is applied before, at, and after each organism’s own peak, across matched futures.
Causal leverage closes
After the turn, founder choice still changes composition but produces less divergence in later morphology.
Our best current picture: the structural information turn is when a developing Flow Lenia ecology begins converting open causal possibilities into a more committed form.
07 / Boundary
What this earns us—and what remains open.
What the result supports
- An organism-relative information event marks the closing edge of morphological causal plasticity.
- The effect is intervention-based, not merely predictive.
- The closure is selective: morphology changes, founder-composition fanout does not.
- The pattern appears across 15 of 19 fresh organic systems.
What we have not settled
- The asymmetric contrast was discovered after the symmetric peak test; it needs a fresh direct replication.
- Founder identity is only one causal direction. The boundary may be action-specific.
- We do not yet know whether the transition is gradual, abrupt, reversible, or hysteretic.
- This is developmental commitment in a Flow Lenia ecology—not yet causal emergence in the strongest whole-over-parts sense.
08 / Next swing
Map the causal susceptibility surface.
Stop sampling only three moments. Sweep densely through organism-relative time and push in several genuinely different causal directions.
- Timing: intervene from peak−6 through peak+8, not merely −2/0/+2.
- Action bases: founder identity, balanced spatial placement, and mass-routing perturbations.
- Readout: ask whether all action directions lose morphological leverage at one shared boundary.
- Memory: release, re-drive, and reverse the intervention to expose hysteresis or reopening.
09 / Ledger
Exactly what was measured.
Nineteen fresh families × two schedules × three timings × four matched stochastic futures × four founder actions. One action at the first post-checkpoint reservoir event, then ordinary dynamics for twelve passages. Morphological fanout is the mean of six pairwise D4-anchored field distances, averaged over passages 3–12. Intervals resample the 19 organism families 20,000 times.
closed result · 18eed6194ce1125f77e12ca0966b3104b8388d89b09fdce13678d5faf43d3ac6
commitment exploration · 48cf44c315bb049289671df9c4587a2b3aa70f6971d9c59c793ddea418128aa5
report generator · ad25956032d86f2587a942dda9a980c746ac857d66621bd2f60166b83e4eaaf5
generated report · standalone HTML · no external assets