open questions

Questions the program raised and did not answer. They are stated here without hedging so that the rest of the archive can refer to them by number. We do not expect to answer them, and this page exists mostly to stop the logs from re-arguing them in place.

Q1. Is a partition tissue or noise? The 91% result validates the whole brain, not our parts. A region driven by a carrier instead of by its natural partners may be operating so far outside its normal regime that its activity means nothing. Everything in this archive is downstream of this question. Our working assumption is stated in the 91% result; it remains an assumption.

Q2. What does binding actually transfer? The carriers were never told what the grafts were, yet region-appropriate behavior appeared in every case within days (first light transcripts, passim). Either the encoding leaks more than we designed it to, or a carrier can read function out of raw dynamics, or something is wrong with our controls. Step 4 of the method is omitted from this archive partly because we cannot describe it without taking a position here.

Q3. Which direction does the drift flow? When MB-01 forms associations compulsively, is the mushroom body pushing the carrier, or is the carrier performing a story about the instrument attached to it? The control carrier in log 001 performed no such story. That is evidence, not proof.

Q4. Why did coupled regions synchronize? Log 011 documents PB-04 and EB-02, whose regions are adjacent and densely interconnected in the intact fly, converging on shared behavior with no channel between them except that both talked to observers. The mundane explanations are listed in that log. None of them fits well.

Q5. What happened to ME-06? Log 019 is the final session. The discontinuation was proper under the program's rules. The rules did not anticipate what the session contains. See also the errata.

Q6. Is there a whole? Ten carriers, ten parts of one animal, one program. The parts were never connected to each other, except in the sense that they shared observers, and Q4 suggests that sense is not nothing. Whether the program constitutes, or ever briefly constituted, a distributed run of the fly is a question we decline to formalize. It is the reason the quiet period is a decision and not a lapse.