Why Digital Evolution Stalls before Complex Functions: A Five-Layer Etiology on the moniqi Selection Field and the Economics of the Memory Window

Digital evolution platforms commonly stall before producing complex functions, and such stalls rarely come with attributable, reproducible verdicts. This paper constructs a digital selection field physically aligned with the premises of non-equilibrium life: imperfect replication occurring only at reproduction, no rollback within a single run, solar energy as the sole external energy input, and energy-conservation auditing throughout. On this platform, we operationalize the functional layer of Hypothesis 9 of the consciousness theory V67 as a heritable, mutable variable T — a memory window retaining the last T steps of perception, paid for at Landauer-style rates — and complete seventeen experiment arms under a pre-registration regime in which predictions precede data, gated by oracle double-gates that precede any evolutionary conclusion. On a feedforward-network kernel, delayed-reward niches exert no selection pressure on long T; this true negative was independently replicated across environments. On a symbolic-instruction-string kernel, stalling was dissected into a five-layer etiology — instrument, component, economics, ignition, and writability; the efficacy boundary of functional staircases was empirically located at per-level net adaptivity in the current ecology; when energy is earned primarily through navigation, open evolution crosses the multi-direction coordination barrier, a positive result currently classed as exploratory. The memory window converges at the cost-benefit equilibrium T=16 when navigation is complete, and this point is invariant across three ecologies. Open co-evolution of navigation and memory produced its first fully successful ignition; the remaining seeds failed to ignite even with windows extended to 150k steps and external injection, behaving as a stable trap at the current sample size. The five-layer etiology, oracle gates, and the pre-registration and independent-replication regime are directly portable to other digital evolution platforms. All conclusions are restricted to the structural and functional layers and do not constitute judgments of consciousness.