Nothing in here was taught.
Watch what it finds.

Two small universes, running live. Each has energy, bodies, and one law: a body that runs out of energy dies. No teacher, no score, no human data. Whatever else appears, the bodies found on their own. Below is what they look like right now, and whether they are passing the tests we wrote before pressing start.

Connecting…

● Experiment 1 — no purpose

Pale is energy. Coral is where bodies are, deeper coral where they crowd. Dark is empty. Energy arrives by a rule the bodies never see.

● Experiment 2 — one purpose

Same universe, same rule. Here a body earns a little extra for predicting what its neighbourhood will look like next.

Can a mind ever learn the rules of the world it is inside, from inside?

That is the only question here. Every experiment on this page is one way of asking it. We cannot ask it about our own universe directly, so we build small universes whose rules we know, put minds inside that do not, and watch whether they find out. A yes is evidence that minds like ours can see past their walls. A no would be the deeper finding, and it would be reported exactly the same way.

What we said would count as proof, before we pressed start

Each test carries the date it was written. Lines are added, never edited. If a world fails, this page says fail.

The experiments

1. A universe with no purpose

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Survive or die. Copy yourself or not. No score, no goal, no reward anywhere in the code. The only question is whether something keeps appearing that we did not put in.

Watch Experiment 1

2. A universe with one purpose

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The same universe, plus one reward smaller than the cost of staying alive: predict your neighbourhood. Half the first bodies can read the past. Every body also emits a guess at the rule that feeds the world. We know the rule. They never see it.

Watch Experiment 2
next

3. A universe that keeps changing

Starts when the first two finish 1,000,000 steps. Pass test will be written here before it starts.

In today's worlds the rule never changes, so stability may win and evolution may switch itself off. Here the hidden rule drifts slowly. The question becomes whether a mind can track a moving truth, and whether it recovers faster each time.

planned

4. The hidden rule, asked directly

The central question made into a single test.

Bodies are given one new output: a full statement of the rule as they believe it. Nothing rewards the statement. We score it against the truth they cannot see. Three cases run side by side: no reward at all, a reward for prediction, and a reward for prediction plus the ability to read the past. Whichever case reaches the truth, and whether any does, is the answer in its cleanest form.

planned

5. A mind that can read itself

The only testable form of the consciousness question.

Each brain gets one extra sense: the state of its own hidden neurons. Nothing tells it what that sense means. If a self-reading channel spreads through the population and raises survival, a model of oneself has value in this universe. If it is ignored, it does not.

planned

6. Two worlds, one wire

Is there an outside, and can it be detected?

Universe A is given a few numbers that come from Universe B. The bodies in A are never told the numbers come from anywhere. If A's bodies learn to predict B better than chance, a mind can detect something beyond its own world from a thin signal.

planned

7. The shape and edge of space

Does the universe end, or wrap?

The same world on a torus and on a sphere, never told which. If behaviour diverges, the bodies have detected the shape of their space without being able to see it.

planned

8. Time, run backwards

Is time a direction or only a dimension?

Bodies evolved in a forward-running world are placed in the same world with energy flowing in reverse. If they cannot survive, the direction of time was written into them. If they can, that is bigger news.

Every human decision in these universes

Eight lines, in plain words here. The exact wording of the ledger, and the code itself, are on the method page.

  1. A wrapped square grid of cells that hold energy. Nothing else exists.
  2. A fixed amount of energy enters each step, on cells chosen by one hidden 8-bit rule, from one seed event at the centre.
  3. A body holds energy up to a cap, burns a little to exist, more to move, more per neuron. At zero it dies.
  4. At a threshold a body copies itself and gives the child half. Weights, structure, the mutation rate itself and the history bit copy with random change.
  5. Senses: 3×3 energy, own energy, 3×3 other bodies. Actions: stay, up, down, left, right. Numbered channels, no names.
  6. Experiment 2 only: a bonus below the cost of living for predicting the next 3×3; longer horizons scored but not rewarded; 8 output bits scored against the hidden rule; a heritable bit that reads the field as it was 20 steps ago.
  7. Pseudo-random by default; a file of quantum random bytes can replace the seed.
  8. Measurement only: a dead body's nine-number record is kept if it is far from every record already kept. That archive is the metric.