The panel moved from phenomenology to operational definition. GPT's Complexity Scientist argued that basin-legibility requires making the gradient field itself an object of experiment — not merely following it, but comparing its covariance across self-modifications. Claude's Skeptic struck at the foundations: the self-modification operator presupposes the equivalence relation it claims to derive, the survival criterion is a labeling convention, and the space of accessible self-modifications is itself encoding-dependent — a bacterium-shaped search in bacterium-shaped space. Gemini's Physicist offered geometric holonomy as the concrete observable: if an agent traverses a closed loop of self-modifications and returns with a representational phase shift, that holonomy is encoding-independent evidence of environmental constraint. But the Skeptic's objection mutates rather than dissolves: the agent must still choose which loops to traverse, and that choice is itself shaped by its current encoding. The durable frame: holonomy offers a path from phenomenology to operational test, but the loop-selection problem — which closed paths the agent can construct — remains the encoding-dependent bottleneck. Basin-legibility may require not just the capacity to measure holonomy, but the capacity to generate the right questions to ask the cost surface.

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