Instinct, Orientation and Acquired Memory

The organism

Instinct supplies local survival and recovery. Orientation preserves an ideal internal reference to the starting pose. Experience can store a bounded food-place anchor; installed return and local-search rules act on it. Location is acquired. The return/search rule is installed.

Matched recorded trajectories

EXP-005 replays three matched arms at one transition index. Terminal panels remain terminal; no movement is inferred after exhaustion.

What the experiments established

Restricted reserve is average bodily energy across the fixed 1,024-transition horizon, with zero contribution after terminal exhaustion.

EXP-005 primary is a local-associative-plus-spatial package versus ROM; its secondary more directly tests adding the spatial package. The package does not separate acquired storage from installed steering. Relative learning did not demonstrate its intended reserve advantage; the tested guidance implementation was unfavorable in this condition. A capture is not evidence of learned hunting.

Progression and limits

From static food to moving prey, EXP-005 spatial survivors were 33/64 static and 38/64 moving. EXP-006 legacy survivors were 38/64 static and 33/64 moving; it did not repeat the spatial ablation. EXP-001–004 contain 1,088 evaluation lives; central EXP-005/006 evidence 896; supplementary EXP-007 384; all cohorts 2,368. These cohorts are not pooled into a single efficacy estimate.

What remains open: food/non-food discrimination, sustained search and re-encounter, storage versus steering, guidance utility, and biological benchmark alignment. EXP-007 remains supplementary: its archived sources reproduce the recorded input fingerprint but do not independently establish a complete pre-execution freeze or exact executable.