Paths of Implementation: The Mechanism of the Subject, a Simulated World, and a Falsifiable Prediction

This preprint summarises Book Three of Project Causa Sui, a theory of the origin of subjecthood. Book One set out the theory and closed by naming three directions without which it would remain merely a coherent argument: a prediction that can be tested and may fail, a single formal language, and a model on which the mechanism of the subject can be made to work. Book Three reports how far it has been possible to advance along each. Part I refines the concepts. Postulate 1 — the history of a subject is inseparable from its carrier — receives a strict form, P1*, stated with respect to a causally closed boundary C(A), for which the Markov blanket serves as a model; separability is defined as the possibility of a copy with zero difference from the original; P1* is identified as an axiom of historical substrate realism, and Block's argument shows that no behavioural test can establish whether it holds. Part II describes the mechanism of the subject as a hierarchy of NRMs (a graph together with the matrices of its vertices) and identifies the graph, not the matrices, as the locus of irreversibility. Part III presents a simulated world — an emulator, not a subject — in which the mechanism was made to work: no contradiction was found, and of 200 individuals able to give rise to the new but deprived of memory none lived to the end of the term, against 52 of 200 with memory. Its central result is that generation without retention does not accumulate into experience. Part IV records a prediction for living neural tissue, published in advance, analyses the connection of living tissue with silicon, and argues why the living cannot be copied exactly. The main thing left undone is a formal language. Throughout, the paper keeps the book's distinction between what follows, what the theory accepts, and what remains open. Code and data: https://igorch1955.github.io/stand/