Open Questions — Research Scratchpad

Raw questions that seeded the analytical notes. Each is tagged with its current status; several were taken up and answered (or reduced to measurable quantities) in living-system.md and mathematical-core.md. Kept here as a provenance trail and a list of what genuinely remains.

1. Unification vs. anonymization. How does the unification of storage/compute/routing square with the anonymization of routing? What is a node in this context? Is there a connection to cryptography here? → Partially addressed. "What is a node" is answered: a node is a Markov blanket / agent solving one control problem (living-system.md §2, mathematical-core.md §0), and the unification is formalized as min-cost flow over the three MATERIALIZE edges (mathematical-core.md §1). Still open: the tension between that unification and anonymous routing — anonymization deliberately hides the spacetime path that the min-cost-flow optimizer wants to expose — and whether there is a clean cryptographic framing of it.

2. Connections to compiler theory. Is there a relation between the unification and optimizing compilers / superoptimization? What is the existing mathematical research (topological / categorical connections)? Can we flesh this out mathematically, perhaps in disp syntax? → Still open. Gestured at — tree-calculus reduction steps give a machine-independent work metric and disp is the value algebra (mathematical-core.md §1.1, §1.5) — but the superoptimization / categorical connection is not developed.

3. When are Markov blankets a useful abstraction? Node-level blankets (inputs/outputs) feel natural, but the others feel more constructed / drawable in many ways. When is the abstraction load-bearing rather than decorative? → Partially addressed. The honest answer is that the blanket framing is a design heuristic and organizing language, not free predictive math (living-system.md §8, "FEP is slippery"). mathematical-core.md §1.3 de-metaphorizes it by choosing the free-energy functional and deriving alignment (Prop. 1). The non-arbitrary blankets are exactly the three nesting levels node ⊂ zone ⊂ network (§0); other drawings are not claimed to be load-bearing.

4. The dark-room problem. Is there LessWrong / FEP literature on the dark-room issue, with obvious solutions / regularizers? Or does it solve itself by running into the real world? → Resolved (in principle). The dark room is the FEP failure mode where an agent minimizes surprise by predicting a trivial niche. It is formalized as a bifurcation at deference slope L = 1 (mathematical-core.md §2, Prop. 3 — viability inequality V1) and countered by epistemic-value rewards and reality-coupling (living-system.md §3). "Solves itself by hitting reality" is exactly the reality-coupling / between-network-selection answer (living-system.md §6).

5. Is Sybil resistance elegantly solvable? Is there a theoretically clean solution, or only best-approximation? If approximate, who wins, and are there provable bounds? → Largely resolved / reframed. Stop asking "is this a person?"; ask how much independent information the constituent contributes — n_eff = 1ᵀΣ⁻¹1 (mathematical-core.md §3, viability inequality V2). Provable content: the mimicry-cost bound (Prop. 6) — faking k agents costs ≈ being k agents — but it is asymptotic. Genuinely-open residue: the arms-race floor at finite monitoring richness (mathematical-core.md §8, Open-1).

6. A framework for coupling Markov blankets. Is there a mathematical framework for the general nature of coupling between blankets — correspondences between the modeled ("demiurge") world and real life? → Partially addressed. Cooperation is formalized as a continuous coupling field over the latency-trust coordinate space (living-system.md §6, mathematical-core.md §5): edge weight = degree of fate-sharing. A general theory of coupled blankets — and the model-vs-reality correspondence the "demiurge" phrasing was reaching for — is not yet developed; it overlaps with the still-open grand-conjecture stability proof (mathematical-core.md §7).