The notion of a viability constraint that determines the range of conditions under which a biological individual can survive plays a central role in work in artificial life and theoretical biology. However, while there has been considerable attention paid to the case where this constraint is defined externally, very little work has been done on the more natural case where this constraint arises intrinsically from the operational closure of the individual itself. Using a glider in the Game of Life as a toy model, we show how to systematically derive the intrinsic viability constraint of an emergent individual from its closed network of constitutive process interdependencies.

Autopoiesis aims to describe the organization and limits of living systems. Unfortunately, its theoretical development has largely been carried out verbally, with less focus on developing formal concepts of the key ideas, such as structure, organization, process, etc. Using toy models of emergent individuals allows us to fully characterize these concepts concretely. This paper generalizes previous work that analysed autopoiesis in the Game of Life. I use the Larger than Life family of cellular automata to explore how the concepts of production process, autopoietic network, and cognitive domain extend to this space, before moving to the continuum limit in RealLife — a continuous-space, discrete-time family of Euclidean automata.