The system loses prediction while gaining a direction.
During the same four developmental steps, hidden composition differentiates, visible motion accelerates, the body expands away from its initial rectangle, and ordinary predictive information collapses. Meanwhile the native direction gains causal leverage.
Hidden differentiation
Spatial variation of hidden channel log-odds rises in every family.
Visible acceleration
Mean absolute visible-field change per step rises in every family.
Predictive shedding
Whole-state TDMI falls sharply; Φ-R also falls by -0.46.
This is not a scalar “more Φ” story.
Both readouts fall through the ignition window. But the causal arrow strengthens. The state is becoming less able to predict its immediate next state while becoming more asymmetrically able to steer its longer-term morphology.
Predictive information and causal leverage have separated. That separation may be the important event—not a peak in either score by itself.
The visible body opens while hidden composition differentiates.
Exact state source 63, previously selected mechanically as the median q12 causal-strength organism. Orange/cyan maps show the hidden two-channel allocation under the same visible scalar body. All aggregate curves use 64 organisms and 16 families.
Organism formation may be a transfer from prediction into directional control.
The initial state is highly predictable because it is still close to a constrained seed regime. As hidden composition differentiates and visible development accelerates, immediate predictability drops—but the system acquires an internally aligned direction with selective control over what body comes next.
A regime, not one magic variable
No single q12−q8 scalar strongly explains which organism gains the most causal strength; the largest rank association is only 0.185. The ignition is coordinated across several dimensions rather than reducible to one readout.
The Levin connection gets sharper
The important precursor may not be a rising information quantity. It may be a reorganization in how information relates to possible futures: less passive next-step prediction, more privileged long-horizon causal direction.
Move a system across the ignition.
Observation has taken us as far as it should. The direct test is to transplant the q12 hidden organization into the same q8 visible body—and transplant q8 back into q12.
If q12-in-q8 advances the visible developmental turn and gives the q8 state q12-like causal leverage, while q8-in-q12 delays or weakens both, then we have located and manipulated a hidden pre-morphological state transition—not merely correlated with it.