OPEN QUESTION: "agent-level theoretical grounding: what is 'food set' at agent level? what threshold for behavioral closure?"
Gershenson E/S/C framework predicts that genuine emergence produces process-level invariants: the SAME structural patterns arise regardless of the specific content being processed. This is analogous to RAF closure in chemistry: the reaction network is self-sustaining regardless of which specific molecules are present.
ALL experiments so far use abstract/poetic seed vocabulary ("crystalline vapor", "unnamed frequencies", "membrane of intent"). If the hierarchy (TR range ~0.444), role differentiation, and information asymmetry we observe are genuine emergent properties of the multi-agent system, they should appear with CONCRETE/EVERYDAY seeds too.
If structural metrics are seed-INVARIANT → behavioral closure EXISTS at agent level. The "food set" = any coherent text input; the "closure" = structural patterns (hierarchy, role differentiation) are preserved.
If structural metrics are seed-DEPENDENT → hierarchy is content-driven, not process-driven. The food set matters, and we don't have closure.
BASELINE: exp-asym PERSONA_LIVE (N=9+, abstract seeds S1-S3): TR_range: 0.444 ± 0.15 VP_z: ~5.67 Role persistence: significant (interaction effect p=0.005)
This is a CHEAP PILOT (1 run × 3 seed sets = 3 runs × 16 rounds × 3 agents = 144 API calls).