The Silicon Organism: Conditional Emergence in Resource-Bounded Agent Societies

What changes when a language model is no longer encountered as a stateless conversational interface, but is embedded in a persistent loop with memory, tools, resource constraints, other agents, and consequences? This interdisciplinary working paper develops a silicon-organism thought experiment and places it within a genealogy spanning machine evolution, cybernetics, artificial life, agent-based modelling, and contemporary language-model societies. It critically compares Project Sid and Emergence World, argues that observed behaviour belongs to a coupled model–environment system, and proposes experiments that vary model, prompt, role, tool, resource, memory, peer, trajectory, and evaluator layers. This 0.9 record preserves the reviewed body exactly as supplied to separate Astra and Gemini AI review exercises. The full author byline, reserved DOI, and preferred citation were added or corrected in the public front matter afterwards. It is retained for transparent comparison with the revised 1.0 edition and is not the recommended final edition. AI outputs are not used as substantive evidence, and Jeremy Varnham retains responsibility for the claims and editorial decisions.