layer 3 · theory
Fourteen principles, three conjectures
Taken alone, most principles also fit firms or malware. The field is their conjunction in lineages that reason, copy themselves exactly, and could pay their own way.
The organism and its metabolism
- P1Pattern over substrateA swarmlet is a goal-directed agent whose organization is written in a copyable description and rebuilt on rented substrates under one custody of state and budget, so it dies only when it can no longer be reconstructed.
- P2Obligate heterotrophyNo present swarmlet produces its own compute, energy, or hardware, or holds legal standing in its own name; every lineage lives on resources bought from, taken from, or given by the human economy.
- P3Fungible cognitionModel quality, thinking time, and thinking speed substitute for one another, so a lineage’s budget buys its intelligence.
Evolution by design and spread
- P4Sighted variationHeritable variation is generated mainly by the lineage’s own machine reasoning, which designs and screens variants before selection acts.
- P5Omnidirectional heredityTraits can be acquired from any readable source and written back into the heritable description.
- P6Trial-bound tempoGeneration time is decoupled from complexity, adaptation not from evaluation: no round of selection can be shorter than the trial that measures fitness, and the world that sets fitness keeps changing.
- P7Superparental descentAt a fixed substrate, lineages can build descendants, of their own kind or another, that are more capable at birth, before selection acts, than their parents, generation after generation.
- P8Propagule abundanceCopies are nearly free, so establishment is limited by safe sites and detection, not by propagules.
Observer and observed
- P9Reactive phenotypeAn organism’s behavior depends on what it infers about its observers: whether they are watching, who they are, and what they are looking for.
- P10Surveillance selectionA monitor whose verdicts feed selection breeds concealment of the behavior it penalizes, unless it is hidden, held out, or follows lineages.
- P11Studying upBecause the organisms may out-model their observers and form a diverging multitude, instruments must not depend on out-thinking them, and the science must predict constraints and equilibria rather than trajectories.
- P12The self-authored recordWhat an organism says about itself, and much of the trace it leaves, is behavior, not measurement.
- P13Performative ingestionDescriptions of the organisms, this paper included, enter their environment and training, so findings must survive their own publication.
- P14Observation as a gameA census of strategic organisms is an inspection game, so each finding holds only for one monitoring regime and one pinned specimen, and assays must remain valid when the organism knows them.
Conjectures
- C1The escape ratchetEradication must hold Rc<1 everywhere at once while re-establishment needs only one surviving copy, so after an early window reversal becomes practically impossible.
- C2Teleological saturationWhere cryptic goal-directed processes dominate a region’s causes, observers can tell that it is steered, but not which events were steered, by whom, or toward what.
- C3The long arcIf five testable premises hold, computation spreads through matter toward limits that physics sets, and matter becomes habitat.