A field without stipulated objects: how a component counter passed itself off as diversity

Organisation in a digital medium, and its boundaries. In a continuous medium with no stipulated objects (the Gray–Scott model) organisation arises, inheritance and selection are measurable, but the number of "structures" turns out to measure the fraying of a single percolation cluster rather than a number of bodies. This version corrects our own main number: the heterogeneity contrast is not a steady-state doubling but a time integral that includes an early transient, and its magnitude depends on the numerical scheme — +3.57 components at dt = 1.0, +1.24 at dt = 0.5, with a plateau of +1.00 and 0.00 respectively. The grid comparison reported in earlier versions is relabelled as a change of scale, because in this model family resolution enters as a 1/Δx² coefficient on diffusion. Unchanged and still standing: durable structures are equal in heterogeneous and homogeneous worlds (1.3 versus 1.2); form does not transfer (8–11 % keep their class, 50–67 % die) and no measured property predicts survival; the earlier nulls came from a world uninhabitable by a constant (income ceiling 0.008 against cost 0.03, break-even b = 0.0075), and in a habitable world a self-model evolves — confirmed by an intervention that severs the organism's action on the resource (+0.0362 in ten of ten runs falls to 0.0000 in none of eight). Seven of our own conclusions are retracted, two weakened, two rewritten, and now one number qualified by three tests. Every number is recomputed from its aggregate by a script in the archive. English edition of v1.4; the Russian original is included. Version note. v1.6 corrects a sentence in section 4.5 of v1.5.1 that described the heterogeneity contrast as a steady state. It is not: the contrast decays to a plateau and depends on the time step. See sections 10dv-10dz of the line plan in the archive.