Each round suspends explanatory privilege, keeps the evidence, reconstructs what is required, then asks whether a returned category can stand independently and what type of return it is.
Time / energy / matter / gravity
The equations survived; independent noun boxes did not.
What we removed
The assumption that inherited physical nouns must be independent fundamental primitives.
What survived
Established quantitative physics and its native mathematical distinctions.
What changed
Their familiar offices repeatedly reconstructed through interdependent geometry, proper-time, energy, and causal/reachability relations. This exposed mutual constitution, not identity.
Status
CALIBRATION / BOUNDED RESULT No derivation of relativity, gravity, quantum interference, dimensionality, continuity, or new physics.
Tangible / intangible
Ask what carries the consequence.
What we removed
The tangible/intangible label as the primary causal explanation.
What survived
Material differences and the need for a present physical or functional carrier.
What changed
An encoded rule, contract, learned association, or stored bit can alter futures through presently instantiated structure.
Status
WORKING HYPOTHESIS No proof of physicalism or identity.
Biotic / abiotic
Find the organizational transition.
What we removed
The word "living" as if it already explained the causal discontinuity.
What survived
Self-maintenance, restoration, closure, adaptation, and recoverable viable routes.
What changed
Closure is currently typed as a composite topology; recoverability is an operator over reachability under a declared rescue family. Neither is an immutable primitive.
Durable event-dependent difference with later causal consequences.
What changed
Scar tissue, hysteresis, configuration, and synaptic change become examples of a broad retention office without becoming autobiographical memory or intelligence.
Status
CANDIDATE RECONSTRUCTION
Intelligence / adaptation
A crack is not intelligent.
What we removed
The intelligence label as an unexplained threshold.
What survived
Retention, adaptation, prediction, counterfactual selection, and revision of reachable futures.
What changed
Intelligence became a graded candidate ladder with explicit additional operations.
Status
CANDIDATE Standard cognitive science has not been replaced.
Organism / environment
The boundary may follow the closure.
What we removed
Skin or component inventory as an automatic system boundary.
What survived
Dependencies required to maintain the organization.
What changed
Symbiosis, colonies, and infrastructure-dependent systems become closure-boundary questions.
Status
CANDIDATE EXPLANATORY MOVE
Not every comparison closes.
Correspondence statuses include identical value, formal equivalence, structural correspondence, witnessed simulation, shared signature only, unsupported, and incomparable. A resemblance is not a discovery.