The Owen
Human AI ProjectLEARNING THROUGH EXPERIENCE
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8 September 2026 · v111.4 · Project · 3 min read

Same words. Different outcomes.

What happens when we remove the world, or deliberately pair the words with the wrong consequences?

Source validation
Historical original report, retained as evidence.

Matched arms

All arms received the same 131 surface utterances in the same order from the same v111.3 learner snapshot.

  • Full cross-situational experience: utterance, context, prediction, actual consequence, error, update and retry.
  • Text exposure only: the utterance is recorded; explicit surface/canonical corruption evidence may be retained, but no semantic outcome is supplied.
  • Shuffled context: the same utterance is paired with a deliberately mismatched semantic operation, polarity or conversational consequence while the visible entities remain valid.

The shuffled arm is important: it proves that merely running the update code is not enough. The consequence must match the utterance's actual situation.

Frozen v111.3 Blind Examiner, seed 771113

ArmOverallLanguage meaningNoisy languageHypotheses
Pre-v111.4 snapshot83/1005/1711/160 v111.4
Full92/10014/1711/16280
Text only83/1005/1711/160
Shuffled71/1002/172/16316 conflicting/mismatched

Independent hand-authored language set

ArmScore
Full22/40
Text only13/40
Shuffled6/40

Full exceeded text-only by 9 cases and shuffled context by 16 cases.

Development dynamics

ArmInitial errorsSuccessful changed retriesUnresolved retries
Full653431
Text only1310131
Shuffled8416120

The shuffled arm can occasionally fit its deliberately false local pairing, which explains its 16 changed retries. Its poor blind scores show that those local changes do not transfer to the real semantic program.

Interpretation

The intended mechanism survives the ablation: correct world/conversation outcomes matter substantially more than surface exposure, and mismatched outcomes are actively harmful. The result is inconsistent with the claim that v111.4 merely memorised the presented text.

The result does not establish that every useful form was learned. Frozen noisy-language performance did not improve in the primary seed, so broad noise robustness remains unproven.

Sources and limits

  • OWEN_V111_4_LANGUAGE_ABLATION_REPORT.md

Engineering reports and reviewed source support this entry. Bounded results do not establish general intelligence or consciousness.

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