Live Causal Core Replacement with Source-Resolved Provenance: Independent Stochastic Replication and Adversarial Tests of a Minimal Mechanism of Causal Succession

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This computational preprint tests a narrow mechanism termed live causal core replacement with source-resolved provenance. A previous continuous-state implementation suggested that a self-maintaining random catalytic system can replace its currently causally necessary core without crossing a declared continuity gap. An adversarial audit also showed that continuity alone does not determine causal origin, because weak exogenous seeding can independently initiate the same successor organization.The present study independently reimplements the mechanism using a discrete stochastic multitype birth–death / tau-leaping formalism with integer counts, Poisson births, binomial decay, random directed catalytic networks, intervention-based core ablations, and explicit parent-derived versus environment-derived source labels. Parameters were calibrated only on pilot seeds 0–299 and frozen before a 500-world holdout (seeds 30000–30499).In the holdout, 34.2% of worlds produced a persistent continuous successor and 29.0% satisfied the strict intervention-based criterion for causal core replacement. A matched acyclic null produced 0% passes. Collapse followed by external reconstruction often recovered a highly similar successor despite zero continuity, while environment-only seeding could independently produce persistent and frequently core-matched successors. Under mixed sources, parent-derived provenance varied continuously with environmental inflow.The robust conclusion is deliberately limited: causal continuity is compatible with replacement of the currently necessary catalytic core, but continuity does not determine causal provenance; provenance must be measured separately. The model does not establish biological individuality, personal identity, consciousness, or a universal law of living systems.The deposit includes English and Russian manuscripts, the frozen replication protocol, source code, holdout outputs, causal ablations, DAG controls, reconstruction experiments, environmental-seeding attacks, provenance tables, figures, automated tests, and SHA-256 checksums.