Assistant-drafted lab note

Stripes, dust, and false fission

5–8 August 2026 · Negative pilot result.

The planned causal-emergence experiment depended on finding organisms that genuinely divided: one coherent Flow Lenia body had to become two substantial bodies and remain that way. We began with a conservative screen of 24 runs. None produced a split in which the descendants retained between 70 and 130 per cent of the parent’s mass and remained separate for 50 steps. A more active condition using 64 patches also settled back into one dominant body.

At first glance, the detector appeared to have found one positive event. Looking at the masses made clear that it had not. The alleged second body contained just 0.060 units of mass in a system containing about 276.6. It was dust.

A different failure appeared on striped organisms. A fixed activity threshold sliced one continuous body into dozens or even hundreds of components because the dim gaps between stripes were being mistaken for empty space.

We repaired that part of the assay by judging components relative to the parent body. Counts that had ranged from 25 to 232 raw fragments fell to a median of one relevant component and a maximum of four. Raising the mutation rate did not reveal hidden fission events. Between mutation rates of 0.1 and 1.0, 62–83 per cent of snapshots instead hit the detector’s 256-component ceiling, usually because mutation had dissolved the organism into speckle.

So the pilot answered a question we had not originally intended to ask: under these conditions, fragmentation, striping and dust were much easier to produce than a clean physical division. Calling those artifacts “fission” would have contaminated everything measured afterward. We therefore left the predictive-information outputs unopened, abandoned spontaneous fission as the entry point for this campaign, and moved to imposed growth-and-division cycles whose events could be identified without guesswork.

The developmental-fission record follows the distinction between low-density fraying and physical division in later experiments.