Empirical Grounding for the Inhibition Coefficient

Empirical Grounding for the Inhibition Coefficient

The ι framework was theoretical when first written. Two experimental results have since provided empirical grounding.

Computational animism is universal. Experiment 8 on uncontaminated Lenia substrates (Appendix) found animism score greater than 1.0 in all 20 testable snapshots — every pattern at every evolutionary stage modeled non-agentive resources using more internal-state MI than trajectory MI. The participatory default is not a primate quirk or a cultural artifact. It is the computational baseline. Evolution had to actively build the capacity to model things as objects rather than subjects — and our experiments show this capacity gets selected against: ι decreased toward participatory over the 30-cycle evolutionary runs. The world becomes more alive, not less, as selection proceeds.

The ι cost is real. The LLM results (V2–V9) show that systems trained without survival pressure have opposite affect dynamics to biological systems — integration drops under threat rather than rising. The framework explains this as constitutively high ι: LLMs were never fighting against the self-world gradient that biological systems evolved from. This is no longer just a theoretical prediction; it is a measured dissociation between two classes of system in the same geometric space. The geometry is shared. The dynamics differ. The ι difference is why.