# 0003 — The nursery: boot process as curriculum

2026-08-21. Researcher ruling, verbatim:

> "you have to teach children. there is a physical world boot process.
> a perturbable thing started with some default shapes needing
> perturbation and then blossoms"

## What this settles about the feeding protocol (open question 3)

The instrument is not configured; it is *raised*. Day-zero state is a
small set of default shapes — the constitution's §79 elementary
structures (cycle, tree, feedback, inversion, containment, branching,
state transition) standing in for what the physical world hands a child
(persistence, containment, support, before/after, part/whole). Taste,
trace field, and weighting grow by working through a CURRICULUM of these
shapes rendered in multiple representation types and subjected to graded
perturbations — before any culturally loaded material is ever ingested.

The defaults *need* perturbation: an unperturbed default does not
blossom. A curriculum item is therefore not a shape but a triple —
shape × renderings × perturbation family — and what the instrument keeps
across the perturbations becomes its first taste.

Near-misses enter at birth (ADR-0002 ruling 4): the nursery deliberately
includes shapes with a piece missing, so the control population grows up
alongside the taste rather than being bolted on later.

## The developmental-psychology datum (engineer's addition)

Piaget's conservation tasks are literally this project's experiment class
run on children: does quantity survive the pouring into a taller glass?
— i.e., what survives a transformation of representation? Object
permanence is invariance under occlusion; the A-not-B error is a trace
field (footprints) overriding current observation. The physical world's
boot process has a published experimental literature, and it is a
catalogue of invariance tests. Candidate source for curriculum design;
NOT to be imported as ontology (§8) — as a menu of perturbation families
that a well-studied boot process is known to include.

## Consequences

1. Experiment 1 (§79) is promoted from calibration to **the nursery** —
   its constructed artifacts are the default shapes; running it IS the
   instrument's childhood, and its outputs seed the trace field and the
   day-zero weighting (replacing hand-set GED costs sooner than ADR-0001
   assumed).
2. **Curriculum permutation** becomes a first-class deferred experiment:
   raise two instances of the trace field on the same shapes in
   different orders; compare their tastes on identical later artifacts.
   Path dependence (§37) tested on the instrument itself, cheaply, with
   the local model. If order doesn't matter, good — Markovian taste. If
   it does, the curriculum is part of the instrument's identity and must
   be recorded as such (§50: the childhood is instrument metadata).
3. The sapien-logos pattern (seed text booting a being) is explicitly
   NOT reused here: the nursery seeds with structure, not content. What
   boots this instrument is shapes-under-perturbation, not a text.