Abstract
Organizational closure and Open-endedness are both central, widely explored concepts within Artificial Life, although still requiring further theoretical development. In this work, we present a novel approach for characterizing organizational closure in terms of multidimensional mappings and, by building upon it, propose a principled conceptual connection to open-endedness, leading to the notion of open-ended organizational closure. Our fundamental claim is that both these properties are complementary and necessary for minimally adaptive autonomous systems, even prior to evolutionary considerations. As a proof of concept for this idea, we present an experimental analysis of a toy model setup, by examining the dynamics of the Game of Life cellular automaton. Finally we discuss theoretical implications, the limitations of our toy model scenario and suggest lines for further work.