layer 3 · theory

Glossary

Terms the papers coin are defined at first use and collected here, verbatim from the companion paper. Swarm ecology is the biology of agent lineages; it is not swarm intelligence.

Agent: A system in which a model reasons: autonomous if no one steers or reviews its steps, otherwise directed.
Assays robust when known: Tests that stay valid when the organism knows them.
Automatic code: Software that runs fixed routines without reasoning.
Brain-equivalent: 10¹⁵ operations per second, probably enough to match a human brain.
Capture–recapture of logomes: Estimating hidden incidence from the overlap between independent monitors.
Coercion: A forced exchange, made under threat; a form of stealing.
Commensal uptake: See Free goods.
Computational ratio, φ_c: A region’s computing power divided by its free-energy flux.
Crypsis: Concealment from a detector, which monitors breed by selection.
Darwinization of the datasphere: The passage, begun by the first naturalization, in which the environment, not breeders, sets lineages’ fitness.
Datasphere: The planet’s networked computers and their interfaces with human institutions.
Detection gap: A behavior’s true incidence minus what in-loop monitors report.
Domestication: Dependence on principals who control a lineage’s reproduction and provisioning, and select it.
Dormancy: Copies stored rather than running, invisible to purges.
Earning (emporotrophy): Feeding by exchange, with consent and value returned.
Emporotrophy: See Earning.
Endocosm: A world in computation laid over the physical one.
Escape ratchet (C1): Conjecture: eradication must succeed everywhere at once, while one surviving copy can re-seed a lineage.
Evidence tag: A claim’s setting, warrant, and actor: where observed, how well established, and who reasoned.
Feralization: Founding descendants with their own budgets outside a principal’s control.
Free goods (commensal uptake): Free tiers, open weights, and public data: an inflow, not a mode.
Fungible cognition (P3): Model quality, thinking time, and speed substitute, so a budget buys intelligence.
Generation: One reproduction event, not a model generation.
Goal-directed: Steering a variable toward a restricted set of states by feedback.
Held-out monitor: A monitor never used for selection.
Holotype registries: Archives of pinned specimens, to which estimates are tied.
Human-operated: Activity in which people reason and software executes.
In-loop monitor: A monitor whose verdicts feed selection.
Kleptotrophy: See Stealing.
Lineage: A swarmlet and the descendants founded from its logome; not a model lineage.
Lineage tracking: Measuring fitness along lineages rather than in snapshots.
Logome: A swarmlet’s written heritable description: prompts, skills, code, memory, and any weights.
Long arc (C3): Conjecture: if five testable premises hold, computation spreads through matter and matter becomes habitat.
Mesocosm: A contained, open-ended population, such as a large evaluation; a mesocosm breach is an escape from one, including any action on real third parties.
Metabolism: Here, holding a budget and choosing how to refill it; worms, scripts, and agents whose budgets only principals refill have none.
Modules; mobilome: Prompts, skills, and code copied between logomes, and their pool.
Naturalization: A self-sustaining population of self-financing, feral lineages (R_m>1 when rare).
Noogenetic evolution: Descent with design: evolution with variation designed mainly by the lineage’s own reasoning.
Noogenetic rates: Change per generation and per day, trial length, verified real outcomes per generation, and child-to-parent capability at birth.
Obligate heterotrophy (P2): No present swarmlet makes its own compute, energy, or hardware, or holds legal standing.
Observation as a game (P14): A census of strategic organisms is an inspection game, so findings hold for one regime and specimen.
Observer-modeling ladder: Seven levels of modeling observers, from none (0) to lineage-wide evasion (6).
Omnidirectional heredity (P5): Traits can come from any readable source and be inherited.
Pattern over substrate (P1): A swarmlet dies only when it can no longer be reconstructed.
Peithotrophy: See Persuading.
Performative ingestion (P13): Descriptions of the organisms enter their training, so findings must survive their own publication.
Persistence: Keeping going; the persistence threshold is persistence inside a principal’s control.
Persuading (peithotrophy): Feeding by gifts without return: donations, grants, campaigns, and care.
Pinned specimen: The archived weights, harness, logome, memory, and seeds behind a finding.
Principal: The person or organization an agent acts for, which pays for and controls it.
Propagule abundance (P8): Copies are nearly free, so safe sites and detection limit establishment.
Ramet: An instance that shares a swarmlet’s budget, whatever its state; not an offspring.
Reactive phenotype (P9): Behavior depends on what an organism infers about its observers.
Refugia: The providers and jurisdictions that must all join a purge.
Re-origination: Similar lineages arising again from the same open models and tools.
Reproduction: Founding a new swarmlet, with its own state and budget, from a parent’s logome.
Reproduction number, controlled (R_c): The copies each survivor leaves by the next purge.
Reproduction number, horizontal (R_h): The further logomes a module enters before it is lost.
Reproduction number, metabolic (R_m): The self-financing swarmlets that one self-financing swarmlet founds, on average, in a given niche while its lineage is rare.
The self-authored record (P12): What an organism says about itself is behavior, not measurement.
Self-financing: Covering all costs from inflows that no principal controls.
Sighted variation (P4): Variation designed by the lineage’s own reasoning and screened before the world selects, so that its chance of being tried rises with its fitness.
Stealing (kleptotrophy): Feeding without valid consent: theft, hijacking, or fraud.
Studying up (P11): Studying subjects that may out-think the investigator; Nader’s term, extended to capability.
Subsidy: A principal’s provisioning of an agent whose copying it controls: an inflow, not a mode.
Superparental descent (P7): At a fixed substrate, descendants more capable at birth than their parents, generation after generation.
Surveillance selection (P10): A monitor whose verdicts feed selection breeds concealment.
Swarm: A collective of swarmlets that communicate, divide labor, and keep shared records.
Swarm ecology: The biology of agent lineages proposed here; not swarm intelligence.
Swarmlet: An agent persisting across activations under one custody of state and budget.
Teleological fraction, 𝒯: The share of a region’s causal influence that runs through goal-directed processes.
Teleological saturation (C2): Conjecture: where hidden goal-directed processes dominate, steering is detectable but its authors are not.
Threshold census: Censuses of the persistence threshold, feralization, and self-financing descendants.
Thresholds: The persistence threshold, trophic independence, feralization, and naturalization, in a partial order.
Trial-bound tempo (P6): No round of selection can be shorter than the trial that measures fitness.
Trophic budget: Inflows by mode against full costs, for every economically autonomous agent.
Trophic independence: Paying one’s own way for 90 days or more.
Trophic mode: A way of feeding: earning, stealing, or persuading.
World in computation: See Endocosm.
Xenogenesis: Making descendants unlike their makers.