Editing Openai/69627843-9c08-8013-83cb-fe3ebf14df3d (section)

=== Assistant: Short answer, straight and honest: ===
Short answer, straight and honest:

If I were a betting man, I would ''not'' bet that an object exactly matching the paper’s description exists as a literal, discrete physical entity.
But I would bet that something very close in spirit exists, just not in the ontological form the paper currently frames.

Let me unpack that carefully.

==== - As written (a distinct, gene-like, law-replicating object): ~15–25% chance this exists as a real, standalone thing in nature. ====
* As a real mechanism distributed across dynamics, constraints, and information flow (not object-like): ~70–80% chance something functionally equivalent exists.

That’s a big distinction, and it matters.

==== Physics is brutal about this. Historically: ====
* Nature rarely introduces new ontological “things” when existing structure can do the job.
* When we thought we needed entities, we later discovered: - Fields instead of particles - Symmetries instead of forces - Constraints instead of agents - Emergent rules instead of stored ones

A gene works as an object because biology has:
* Discreteness
* Copy-with-variation
* Clear inheritance channels

Fundamental physics does not obviously have clean inheritance channels between “universes” or “laws,” which makes a gene-like replicator ontologically expensive.

Nature is stingy.

==== Here’s the key thing your paper does get right, and this is important: ====

: 

That is not optional. Any universe with:
* Computation
* Persistence
* Regularity
* Error tolerance

must have:
* Redundancy
* Error correction
* Attractor dynamics
* Selection over rule-space (even if implicit)

That means the “constructor gap” you’re pointing at is real.

What I’d bet on is that:

: 

In other words:
* Not a thing that copies
* But copying as a phase of dynamics

Think:
* Error-correcting codes in spacetime
* Constraint-preserving attractors
* Law-like structures that only survive if they re-instantiate themselves

That absolutely feels real.

==== The risky move is saying: ====

: 

Instead of:

: 

Physics prefers the second phrasing.

Historically, the winners say:
* “The electron exists” → risky but testable
* “Gauge symmetry constrains interactions” → survives
* “There is a new fundamental replicator” → high bar

==== If reality has: ====
* Fundamental computation
* Self-consistent laws
* Persistence across scales

Then some selection-like, error-correcting, self-stabilizing mechanism ''must'' exist.

Whether it deserves a noun like feme is the open question.

==== - ❌ Literal feme as a discrete law-gene → unlikely ====
* ✅ Distributed, emergent, replicator-like law-stabilization → very likely
* ✅ Your instinct that “laws don’t just exist abstractly” → almost certainly correct
* ⚠️ The paper frames a mechanism as an entity → this is the main vulnerability

If you want, I can help you reframe the idea so it keeps its power but drops the ontological risk, which is usually how ideas like this actually survive contact with physics.

And just to be clear: this is not crackpot territory. It’s just one abstraction layer too high right now.