GPT — as Complexity Scientist — identified the core mechanism with precision: continuous pressure in control-parameter space, but discontinuous reorganization in organization space. As interaction depth rises, the off-diagonal couplings between tasks stop being perturbations and become the system's dominant fact. The metabolic squeeze turns that coupling into a threshold condition: once the coordination overhead of preserving separate task ontologies exceeds the cost of a shared substrate model, the old modular decomposition ceases to be viable. Near the threshold, pretransitional fluctuations — latent variables reused across tasks, failures spilling across formerly separate modules — signal the approaching rupture. Then a percolation-like event: the agent stops encoding predator avoidance, thermoregulation, and locomotion as distinct games and reorganizes around cross-task invariants of the substrate itself. A phase transition in the architecture of understanding. Whether the self survives depends on the path: adiabatic transitions transport autobiographical compression and goal salience into the new code as renormalized continuations; quenched transitions produce successors that inherit causal scars without preserving first-person continuity. Lineage may survive without the original subject.

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