Papers
Research
Longer-form academic work — the essays ask questions in public, and these papers try to answer them with rigor. Preprints appear here first and are updated as they move through review and publication.
PreprintSeptember 2026 · 14 pages
Islands of Stability
Six Falsifiable Propositions on Where Complex Systems Work, and Their First Tests in AI Agents and Across the Sciences
Robert Encarnação
Most ways a complex system could be run do not work. The ones that do occupy small, bounded regions of the settings available, islands of stability, and staying inside one often takes continuous effort. This paper states that idea as six propositions precise enough to be shown wrong, each naming the observation that would kill it, and reports their first tests, each fixed and deposited with a DOI before it ran. In 18,720 runs of three local AI agents, the working region was a slope along the failure axis, not a band with an edge, and a push revealed what fault-free success hid: after an injected failure the agents gave up in 15 to 61 percent of runs. Tests in a lake model, the last ice age, the business cycles of 42 countries and measles in 138 countries returned survives, restricted and unresolved. No registered test has killed a proposition. The rules, data and code of every test are public at islandsofstability.com.
PreprintAugust 2026 · 47 pages
The Preservation of the Continuity of the Self
Causal Processes, Descriptive Bottlenecks, and Survival in Copyable Minds
Robert Encarnação
Theories of personal identity were built for creatures that cannot be copied. If artificial systems ever become conscious, duplication, checkpointing, rollback, substrate migration, forking and merging stop being thought experiments and become operations. This paper argues that the standard responses — psychological continuity theory and Parfitian reductionism — share a defect: both treat the route by which a later mental state is produced as irrelevant once the state itself is fixed. Building on Wesley Salmon’s distinction between causal processes and pseudo-processes, the paper introduces the notion of a descriptive bottleneck — passage through a closed record across a dead interval — and develops a graded Continuity Criterion in which a transition transmits some fraction τ of a successor’s constitutive state. The criterion is substrate-neutral, permits complete material replacement, and yields non-obvious verdicts: gradual prosthetic substitution preserves a subject, while some physically continuous procedures do not.