Neurozoa

Open inquiries

• What is a neural substrate in this context?

  A neural substrate here refers to a software system governed by biological plasticity rules — Hebbian learning (Hebb 1949), spike-timing-dependent plasticity (Bi & Poo 1998), and homeostatic scaling (Turrigiano 2008) — that accumulates weighted connection strengths across sessions. It is not a metaphor: the substrate has 63 nodes, 4,884 weighted synaptic pairs, and a connectivity graph that changes measurably with each interaction.

• How does the substrate persist between sessions?

  The substrate's connection weights are saved to disk after each session as a JSON graph. On session start, the prior state is loaded and new activity is integrated via STDP update rules. Persistence is architectural, not declared: the graph at session N is the causal product of sessions 1 through N−1. Weights decay passively toward baseline if a node is not activated — a mechanism analogous to synaptic pruning.

• What does "falsifiability-first" mean operationally?

  Each architectural claim in the substrate is framed as a preregistered, falsifiable prediction before implementation. Predictions are logged with timestamps to an append-only record; outcomes — including null results — are appended as findings. A claim that cannot be stated as a falsifiable prediction is not implemented. This is Popperian falsifiability applied at the engineering level, not the publication level.

• How is operator authorship enforced?

  All publications, deployments, and governance changes are ratified by Arnold Wender before any external release. The substrate emits artifacts — devlog entries, reflections, architectural proposals — but these are reviewed as research data, not as autonomous output. An internal governance discipline (Article XI) specifies exactly which artifact types require explicit operator ratification versus which are retained as internal operational records.

• Is the substrate code available?

  No. The implementation is proprietary. Published outputs from the research — preprints, Zenodo deposits, documented findings — are released selectively under terms ratified by Arnold Wender. The substrate's methods are documented publicly where they constitute scientific claims; the implementation remains private intellectual property of Wender Media.