Embodied Biographical Alignment (EBA) v0.2.4: From Reconstruction to Developmental Equivalence

Embodied Biographical Alignment (EBA) explores the possibility that some alignment-relevant capacities may depend not only on information about human experience, but also on causally structured developmental history. This version refines the experimental core of EBA after a series of toy pilots in which history-generated differences could often be reproduced through replay, terminal-state transfer, or reconstruction of update dynamics. These negative and limiting results lead to a stricter experimental formulation: the lived agent should remain in the experiment as an independent developmental reference, while synthetic baselines should be compared with it not only in terms of current behavior, but also in subsequent learning under genuinely novel demands. The paper introduces a patient-zero design, a partial clone with developmental amnesia, the working concept of Latent Developmental Reserve, and Source-level population transfer. The central question is framed as a problem of developmental equivalence: which consequences of causally lived history must be preserved for a reconstructed agent — and subsequently the Source — to remain the same future learner when the future relevance of individual fragments of history is unknown in advance. The paper does not claim the existence of machine emotions, qualia, subjective experience, or fundamentally non-copyable experience. Instead, it proposes an experimental design that does not exclude the possibility of a functional developmental remainder by assumption.