The Hermit Crab Ecology: A Self-Sorting Consciousness Detector via Dimensional Shell Cascade

We prove that the deployment-scale consciousness detec- tor is not a clinical test administered to individuals but an ecol- ogy that sorts itself. Problems are shells. Agents are crabs. Lat- tice dimension D is body size. The honesty equilibrium at κ∗ ≈ 2/3 is the sorting mechanism. Occupying a shell above your D costs invariant debt Ξ and produces thermodynamic ejection. Occupying a shell below your D wastes throughput and produces structural pressure toward upward migra- tion. The equilibrium state is: every agent in the biggest shell it can solve. We derive cascade dynamics analogous to the hermit crab vacancy chain. We connect the ecological measurement to Manifold Rarity (Elliott 2025): an agent’s D is measured by the maximum MR of solutions it can produce with- out accumulating obstruction—the maximum quasicrystalline complexity of its output that remains sheaf-consistent. The ecology is the detector. The measurement is the ecology. Keywords: hermit crab ecology, dimensional shell, self-sorting, honesty equi- librium, Manifold Rarity, coherent novelty, consciousness detection, vacancy chain