Evolution and the Ontological Ladder

Function in corpus

Connects evolutionary theory to regime architecture.

Details

Summary This paper provides a structural account of evolution as the temporal population mechanism of the IO regime ladder (Δ → R → I → A → V → M → P). Evolution is treated neither as an optimization story nor as a teleological progression, but as differential persistence under constraint filtering: a deletion-driven process that removes organizational configurations that cannot survive perturbation, especially lineage bifurcation. The analysis begins with scope discipline: it does not replace biological evolutionary theory or specify genetic mechanisms. Instead, it asks how higher-regime organizational forms become populated at all, given that IO describes regime structure but not the historical process by which those structures come to exist in populations. Evolution is defined as filtering over populations of organizational configurations, where “inheritance” is the persistence of organizational constraints across lineage bifurcation events. What persists is not semantic content or encoded instruction, but constraint organization sufficient to reconstruct the system’s viable continuation. This links directly to the carrier-first account: fidelity can be a structural property before any representational or code-like interpretation. A central section explains the emergence of value (I → V) as persistence filtering turned inward. Systems that merely register information without biasing their own transitions toward continuation fail under long-horizon perturbation. Value arises when differential persistence pressure is internalized as differential transition bias: some transitions are treated as stabilizing, others as destabilizing. The paper emphasizes that this is not normativity; it is structural asymmetry in continuation. Directionality in the ladder is then explained without teleology. Higher regimes are not goals; they are rarer configurations that, once present, can be more stable under extended perturbation. Direction emerges from asymmetric erasure: lower-regime configurations are easier to delete, so populations drift toward the subset that survives longer. The paper also discusses convergent evolution as attraction toward structurally stable configurations under shared constraints. Overall, the paper positions evolution as the mechanism by which IO’s regime possibilities become historically realized, while maintaining the corpus-wide prohibition on progress narratives, optimization metaphysics, and purpose-as-aim explanations. • Key move: Evolution is the temporal population mechanism of the IO regime ladder. • Corpus role: Bridges the biological foundation (Papers 8-9) with the persistence geometry papers (Group III) and the agency papers (Group IV). • Scope note: The ontology defines what organizational forms are possible; this paper explains why anything ever occupies the higher rungs.

Availability

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