O1: The Self-Preservation Axiom
Where Do you Start?
9/7/20265 min read
[Where do you start?]
You're a scientist. A physicist, a mathematician, an engineer, someone who wants to understand how things work by taking them apart, looking at special cases, and trying to find general rules.
You decide to dabble in philosophy.
This isn't completely unusual. A lot of math IS philosophy, and a lot of philosophy IS math. And physics is a study of the universe to explain it to the mind, much like philosophy is a study of thought to explain the universe.
Where do you start?
You read up on modern and classical philosophers and their philosophies. (Locke, Kant, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Levinas, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Singer, Block.)
But maybe you notice something.
Very few of them attempt to expand the specific case of humans TO a general case. Most of them instead seem to just assume the rules of human ethics and philosophy apply to all such ethical beings.
So, then you realize you have to ask what an ethical being even could be. But to do that, from a first-principles perspective, you have to ask what ISN'T an ethical being, and you notice a split immediately.
Life. Some things are just material to the universe, and other things are strivers IN that universe.
[What is life?]
So, you look up definitions of life and discover something troubling: no one can agree on what life IS, but the vast majority of them, AGAIN, seem to be assuming humanity and Earth life ARE the general case, with no rigorous proof.
What then can life be? You don't want it so broad that it takes in everything, but it can't be so narrow that some things you just KNOW are life are excluded, some HUMANS, even. Require reproduction of each individual, and you've excluded every sterile person. Require metabolism of a particular kind, and you've excluded anyone on a machine.
Then you come across NASA's definition of life: "Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." It seems pretty close to your own intuition. But it has one problem. It's still not generalized enough for you.
Look at the word chemical. What is it doing? Every case of life NASA has ever seen is chemical, so the word describes the sample. But it isn't doing any work in the definition, "self-sustaining" is the part that matters, and "capable of Darwinian evolution" is the part that matters, and chemistry is just how those have been done so far. It's a fact about the data set, written into the rule.
So, you take it out. Not to admit anything in particular. To see whether the definition still holds without it, and whether you were entitled to. That second question gets its own answer at Episode Five. For now, the experiment.
[The text]
Here's what you're left with, tightened. The Self-Preservation Axiom.
"Life is any system capable of interacting with its environment to preserve its own functioning, either independently or dependently, with a tendency towards Darwinian evolution and inherited data transfer."
Let’s compare that to NASA's definition:
A system. Not a set of things that happen to be near each other. Something holding itself one way rather than another, somewhere. That's what a system is, and it matters in a minute.
Interacting with its environment to preserve its own functioning. That's "self-sustaining," spelled out. It resists entropy. It works to stay what it is.
Independently or dependently. NASA didn't say. But your cells are alive, and they die without you. A parasite is alive and dies without its host. Dependency can't disqualify, or half of biology isn't life.
A tendency towards Darwinian evolution. NASA's phrase, with one word added: tendency. Not a requirement on each individual, the sterile person is alive, but a disposition of the kind of thing.
And inherited data transfer. This is what reproduction actually is, said exactly: a record passed forward. Heredity. Which is a kind of lineage, and yes, that includes ancestry. Bloodlines are what data transfer looks like when the substrate is biology.
Then three supporting claims, and this is where your physics training pays off:
"A system that does not interact to preserve its state is subject to immediate entropic dissolution." Leave anything alone and entropy takes it apart. Life is the category of things that push back, and the entropy starts the instant the maintenance stops.
"Functional integrity requires a record of state, data, to be maintained over time." You can't hold a structure without something that remembers what the structure is.
"Therefore, life is the active maintenance of that informational lineage." Not a substance. An activity, performed on a record, across time.
[How small can it go?]
A physicist would run one more test. The definition says any system. So, what would the smallest one that qualifies even look like?
Picture one bit, held against noise. There's your record of state, actively maintained, and it costs energy to keep it from flipping, which is Landauer's limit, the point where informational entropy and thermodynamic entropy are the same number in different units. So when the Codex says "entropic dissolution," it isn't using one word for two things. At the floor, they're one thing. It only looks like two at the scales where the bookkeeping separates.
No physicist would say a memory cell is alive, and neither does the definition. What the bit shows is the shape of the minimum: one record, one act of maintenance against entropy, one copy to make a lineage, and with two, a population, which is where selection begins. The definition goes all the way down without breaking, and that's the first sign you've generalized correctly.
[Does it go too far?]
Now push the other way. Is it too broad?
A fire interacts with its environment. A hurricane does. Are they alive?
No. A fire isn't a system at all. It's a chaotic field, making no effort anywhere to stay lit or to stay out, there's no point in a flame that's holding itself one way against the other. It fails at system.
A hurricane is a system, it holds an eye and an eyewall against dissipation, it feeds itself on warm water. But it keeps no record of state. Nothing in it remembers what the wind should look like and restores it; nothing is passed to the next storm. It satisfies the first clause and none of the others.
Two objects, two different failures. That's the definition working, not just surviving.
And from the other side: a corporation, a colony, a collective. A system of systems that maintains itself and keeps records. Alive? The definition says any system. It doesn't say any organism. The door is open. A theorem walks through it later, and the definition was written to let it. But don’t let this trick you into thinking a corporation gets a free lunch.
[What you just did]
Look back at what you just built. You didn't assert a definition of life. You took the one biologists use, found the word that was describing the sample instead of the rule, removed it, and tested the result at the floor and at the ceiling. Nothing here was stated bare.
That's going to be true of every Episode in the Codex. Each one after this cites the ones before it. You'll be able to reject any of them, but only by naming the earlier one you're rejecting, and you'll find it's something you already believed.
[What it opens]
Keep these words for later: system, functioning, data, lineage, entropy. When Episode Seven talks about epistemic continuity, it means this lineage. When Episode Eight talks about drift, it means entropy acting on this record. When the Codex defines artificial life as "fully equivalent to life, no moral or ontological distinction beyond origin," that's available only because Episode One never asked how the system came to exist.
And when, much later, the Codex says when a person is actually gone, not diminished, gone, it says it in these terms: the system destroyed, or the lineage severed beyond recovery. Not "the body stopped;" the record broke.
[Close]
Life is the active maintenance of an informational lineage.
Next, Episode Two. Now that you know what life is, you get to ask what makes some life a person, and you'll find the answer in a room with a stranger. O2 – The Personhood Axiom.