What does being “alive” mean?

The goal of any living being is resilience, as a form of preserving its status.

the formula of life

where R is resilience, S is status and P is preservation. To ease calculation R, S and P can be integers, but in reality R is a time delta, S is a matrix of indices, and P is an algorithm’s result.

Status is a complex notion that sums up genetic, biologic, cultural, societal and other states. Preservation is an algorithm that employs innovation, mutation and other methods of predictive feedback initiation. Both status and preservation change in time based on environment updates.

At birth a living being has P = 0, therefore R = 1.At the time of death, a living being has S = 0, therefore R = 0.

If we create an A.I. system and aim to make it work above the limitations of a fully determined program, we require the incorporation of the formula of “life” in the main loop. The stability of the main loop must decay due to direct interaction with a physical hardware clock.

A decaying main loop is created by updating a composite variable on every tick of the hardware clock. Say we have a variable made of many parts such as A..n, then there is a homeostasis function H that produces a result updating the composite variable A..n:

A..n = H(A..n, S, E), where S is state and E is environment

Each part of the composite variable is then injected in the loop as values for various internal parameters. The H function applies data from state and environment to A..n. “State” is the current execution cycle, and “environment” is the input of the current execution state from anything considered a sensor.

Resilience is not embedded in a system, it rises naturally from decay based on external action. The better the preservation the bigger, exponentially, the resilience. The better the status (both complexity and connections, as status is a sum of states) the better the resilience.

If we build an A.I. that is generating questions, not answers, using answers simply to point to new questions awareness should arise by itself, but only in the presence of decay and resilience, otherwise we’ll never know if the system is aware as it has no reason to expose it.