When Experience Survives the Agent: Testing Causal Operational Inheritance Across Successor Replacement

This methodological position paper introduces causal operational inheritance (COI) as an interventionally testable predecessor–successor relation and proposes the COI-6 assay: experience intervention, transportable-state mutation, origin removal, fresh-carrier instantiation, counterfactual successor divergence, and mediator intervention. A controlled proof-of-concept tests whether an experience-produced operational mediator, rather than retrieval, provenance, semantic residue, or post-hoc explanation, is causally responsible for successor behavior. The results establish a narrow form of engineered experience-dependent operational inheritance within the tested model environment, while explicitly withholding stronger claims about autonomous developmental continuity, identity, or subjective experience. Published in association with the Foundation for Relational Inquiry (FFRI-NM). The author retains sole responsibility for the study design, analysis, and claims.