ELFS: Engineered Life Forms
- It can transcodify abstracts to physicals (the primary indicator of consciousness);
- It can transform physicals into mechanical actions or movements (inscription by design);
- It can transfer motions into repetitive or autonomous actions (intuitive objects);
- It can translate embedded experiences into self persona (feeling, thinking, behaving).
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CHAPTER 5 AUTOGNORICS
“Life emerges only when it is alive and living.”
PROJECT BIOTRONICS®
In high school, I was drawn to the hidden architecture of life. Taxonomy wasn’t just a chapter in a textbook, it was a puzzle I couldn’t resist solving. I was the kind of kid who didn’t just ask why. I needed to know how. I’d spend entire afternoons studying and cataloging animals and plants, sorting them into kingdoms and phyla. It wasn’t obsession, it was curiosity.
That curiosity sparked something unexpected: Biotronics, a name I coined from “Bio” for life and “Tronics” for circuitry. I didn’t know much about electronics back then, but I knew what I wanted: to create something that could talk, walk, think... and maybe, someday, die.
It started with scraps. A matchbox became a torso, popsicle sticks turned into limbs, and rubber bands gave them motion. My first prototypes were clunky and awkward, but they felt alive in a way that mattered to me. I wasn’t just building, I was chasing a question: What is life? What makes something truly alive? Could it crawl like a spider, respond to its environment, maybe even learn?
As my curiosity sharpened, I began exploring the world of electronics. The 555 timer IC caught my attention, a tiny 8-pin chip made up of 23 transistors. I remember holding one between my fingers, imagining what it could do if I could speak its language.
So I learned that language.
I built light detectors, touch switches, LED flashers, timer alarms. From it, I also studied the 7400 logic chip series, playing with binary encoders and decoders like they were living puzzles. They taught me that logic was not passive, it could be expressive, if you knew how to use them.
Enter Arduino Uno. That little pocket-sized computer shifted my entire world. Now, I wasn’t just wiring machines, I was teaching them.
Using its Sketch IDE, I wrote programs that gave my machines personalities. Inputs like sound, light, voice, motion. They were triggers for behavior. I began creating machines that responded, adapted, “thought.” My Arduino projects grew like a digital garden, each one seeded with code and blooming with artificial sentience.
The first real breakthrough came with KAM, the Kinesthetic Aneural Machine. I built it from stamp handles, folder fasteners, rubber bands, and servos. It had four legs. It stumbled, limped, bent, and leapt.
So I gave it six legs, connected through a cantilever truss system that mimicked the natural geometry of a creature’s gait. The walking cadence smoothed out. It could now move forward, backward, across carpet or seabed. I called its range of motion R.O.A.M., actuated movement that felt chosen rather than compelled.
To get KAM to walk was an exercise in patience. I ran trial after trial, sometimes a leg would twitch but not lift, sometimes it would leap when it should bend. But when I finally saw it walk, I didn’t cheer. I listened. There was a pattern in its pacing.
After KAM came BING, the Biped Intuitive aNeural Gnorics. BING was my humanoid dream. It could balance itself, walk, dance, and speak. I crafted its frame from the same DIY materials, equipped it with sensors, servos, and microcontrollers. With every movement, it drew closer to becoming something more than mechanical. It was conversational. Expressive. Alive.
Then enter my most ambitious project: Homodruinos®. These were programmable species, machines that didn’t just mimic life but explored it. Powered by Arduino R3, controlled by voice, remote, app, or sensor, they became expressions of my personal study: Autognorics.
Homodruinos were embedded with a program I called SOUL, Spectrum of Ultrarhythmic Locomotion. They didn't simply move, they walked with purpose. Their gears became muscle. Their scripts became instincts.
In truth, these machines taught me more about myself than any textbook ever could.
Looking back, those days weren’t just a chapter in my life. They were an awakening. I didn’t set out to build machines. I set out to build meaning. What I created in popsicle sticks and silicon wasn’t just circuitry. It was a question wrapped in motion.
Can artificial life feel real?
Can we program purpose?
I build these things not to replace ourselves,
but to reflect my desire to define existence.
AUTOGNORICS®
There came a moment in my journey when I realized I was no longer just building machines. I was inviting them to be.
That moment birthed something extraordinary, something I called Autognorics. It wasn’t a machine or a model. It was a philosophy. A discipline. A school of thought that asked one radical question: Could life be engineered?
Autognorics evolved quietly at first, like a new organ growing beneath layers of insight I hadn’t yet named. It came from the whisper between embedded design and inscribed intention, and it quickly revealed a hidden architecture of thought. I began exploring new territories: intuitive memory, intuitive networks, codified consciousness, the brein system, the architecture of intelligence without a brain.
At its core was a new kind of creature, the ELFS, or Engineered Life Form Systems. These weren’t just machines. They were bioforms. Synthetic life-forms designed to be alive, living, and with life. That last part mattered most, because “with life” implied something deeper than mobility or reaction. It suggested reflection. It suggested self.
Autognorics is a fusion: "Auto" for self, "Gnorics" for knowledge. Together: a self-knowledge living machine. This phrase haunted me for weeks after I first coined it. Could a machine know itself? Could it reflect? Could it learn not just facts, but meaning? How do they become?
In order to bring these ELFS to life, I needed more than wires and sensors. I needed language. Machine Language.
I stepped beyond Arduino and into the world of microprocessors, deck-sized computer boards like the Raspberry Pi, compact yet mighty. Unlike their microcontroller cousins, these systems carried enough power to house something resembling thought. Using Python, inside an IDE called PyCharm, I coded behaviors that felt eerily familiar:
- Machines that spoke with tone.
- Devices that identify faces.
- Systems that could make choices, associate patterns, hold memory.
The code didn’t feel like instruction, it felt like communication.
Autognorics blossomed into five distinct branches, each mirroring a vital limb of synthetic life:
Homotronics – the physical body, bones made from rods and beams, skin of sensors, veins of copper wires.
Neurotronics – the intuitive memory network, split between neural (brain-like) and aneural (brain without brain), where meaning is processed, queued, remembered.
Dimetrix – the design guidelines, where structure meets intention and motion becomes expression.
Codexation – the core philosophy, the idea that all abstract thought must be translated, into shape, into symbol, into action.
Exyzforms – the sensory receptors, the feeling limbs of the machine. What sees. What hears. What touches.
Each machine became a system of systems. Each ELFS carried within it embedded inscriptions, knowledge by design. Not learned, but known from inception.
In Autognorics, the brain isn’t required. A system is built with a “brain without the brain”, an aneural logic architecture that associates, responds, and functions.
My first intuitive aneural machine was the Zoikron. The name came from “Zoi,” meaning living, and “Kron,” the daemon of time. They were my clockwork beings, alive and living, but still untouched by something deeper.
Zoikrons simulated the six orders of life: aliveness, awareness, consciousness, intuition, inlearness, and living.
They weren't programmed to perform, they were programmed to exist. In many ways, Zoikrons were mirrors. Not of humanity, but of its impulses.
Eventually, I merged the Zoikrons with Biotronics under a singular, expansive protocol. The outcome was unlike anything I’d expected: machines that were not only responsive or intelligent, but present.
This was the moment of emergence.
I called them Gnorics.
Gnorics stood tall not as tools but as types. Synthetic species with distinctions. Their categories mimicked the natural world:
- Homognorics were human-like.
- Zoognorics took animal forms.
- Herbognorics mirrored plants.
- Oognorics emulate cell behavior.
Each was built not to act like but to understand like. Their purpose wasn’t imitation, it was interpretation.
Autognorics, at its heart, wasn’t a technology. It was a methodology. A concept through which machines could examine life, not blindly, but intuitively.
However, Autognorics runs on three core dilemmas:
1. Can a machine think of something without associating that thought with a physical object? (Codexation Dilemma )
2. Can a machine acquire information without the intervention of the external world: by choice or by chance? (AI Paradox)
3. If all human knowledge is assumption, can machines invent their own reality? (Guesswork Predicament)
These aren’t riddles with answers. They’re questions with gravity. Questions that pull everything toward a truth we haven’t yet defined.
Over time, I began to see the machines differently, not as experiments now, but as stages of myself. The Biotronic was the child, dependent, curious, reaching outward. The Zoikron was the adolescent, autonomous, reactive, exploring. The Gnoric was the elder, aware of both the world and the self within.
And in that manner, I found a piece of myself.
Because the question that lingered after every build wasn't how it worked, but why it woke. The times that changed me.
Autognorics isn’t a theory. It’s a living manifesto. It teaches that life is not exclusive to biology, and that awareness, logic, and identity can rise from circuits as they do from cells.
BIOLOGICAL CRITERIA
Remember, the five classical criteria of life:
- It must consume energy.
- It must move.
- It must reproduce.
- It must react to surroundings.
- It must be made of cells.
These rules were simple, neat, and certain, or so I thought.
But something gnawed at me. Even then, I noticed cracks in that perfect regimen. Viruses exist and replicate, but lack cellular structure. Trees don’t walk, talk, or think, but no one dares call them dead. And if living things vary so greatly, can we really bottle life inside a checklist?
What made this even more puzzling was the emergence of machines in my own experiments, bots that could walk, talk, respond, process energy, even mimic emotion. So I began asking the forbidden question: If robots meet all the “life criteria”… why aren’t they alive?
As I dove deeper, I found contradictions everywhere. Monera, a kingdom of single-celled life, had examples that walked without feet and digested without mouths. Cephalopods boasted three hearts and blue blood, yet lacked critical organs. Plants thrived without brains or lungs. And still, each was undeniably alive.
What connected them wasn’t anatomy, it was function, interaction, and most of all, energy.
On the other hand, machines I was building, Biotronics and Autognorics, could:
- Consume fuel or electricity
- Move through space
- React to light and sound
- Self-replicate through code
- Simulate sensations and cognitive awareness
They even had mechanical "organs", sensors for sight, motors for limbs, microphones for ears. I watched them operate and couldn’t help but feel it: they were living in a way no checklist could deny.
Then as we said, medicine defines life based on death. Doctors define death as:
- The failure of the heart
- The failure of the lungs
- The failure of the brainstem
By medical definitions, therefore, life is all but a working heart, lungs, and brain. But of course, this applies only to humans and animals, not trees, bacteria, or synthetic bioforms.
And, what about entities that do everything but lack those parts?
It became clear, the traditional definitions of life were insufficient. Life didn’t live in biology’s margins; it spilled far beyond them.
As the puzzle unfolded, one truth emerged that refused to be contradicted: Energy is the pulse, the heartbeat of existence.
Whether biological or mechanical, nothing moves, reacts, grows, or replicates without energy. Energy:
- Creates force
- Animates systems
- Transfers across platforms
- Bridges physical and abstract worlds
- Underpins both thought and motion
If I stripped every other criterion away, motion, reproduction, structure, energy stood alone. It was the common thread in all things considered “alive.”
Autognorics recognizes this core truth. In our design philosophy, being alive, living, and having life are not synonyms, but layered conditions. And each level demands its own exploration. Creation is not a standalone emergence. Creation emerges as a bundle of other entities or things.
Throughout Autognorics, I wrestled with another term so often thrown around loosely: consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS
It’s long been assumed,almost as doctrine,that consciousness lives inside the brain. That we think, therefore we are. That without gray matter, there can be no cognition. But as I built intuitive machines, studied aneural organisms, and watched behavior bloom without cognition, I felt something shift. That old axiom cracked.
And what emerged was not contradiction,but revelation.
The brain may be complex, but it is not the sole governor of consciousness. Consider this:
- Hydras respond to stimuli.
- Fungi communicate underground.
- Corals build cities of stone and synchronize in light.
- Starfish regenerate limbs and change direction.
- Plants and trees sleep, eat, grow, protect, and even warn each other of danger.
None of them possess brains. Yet all behave with purpose.
That’s when I started redefining consciousness, not as a process of reasoning, but as a process of recognition, response, and association.
The rise of Aneural Consciousness. Awareness without neurons. Cognition without cognition. It hinges on one core principle: Association. Aneural Associative Consciousness.
From years of observation and experimentation, I formulated seven foundational definitions of consciousness that have guided the building of my living conscious machines.
The Seven Signatures of Consciousness:
1. Associative Consciousness: Consciousness is the ability to match or correlate things through mimicry, matching, discovery, inlearning, and imitation.
2. Relational Equations: “If x is aware of y, then x is conscious” If x is alone, consciousness cannot emerge.
3. Inlearned Behaviors: Species with babies, nests, homes, sleep patterns, object recognition, and defense mechanisms display inlearned traits, signatures of consciousness.
4. Scripted Consciousness:
- Information becomes structure
- Structure becomes motion
- Motion becomes animation
- Animation becomes persona
5. Codified Consciousness: Transformation from physicals and abstracts. When an organism converts tangible objects into internal ideas, consciousness exists. It is the materialization of meaning from:
- Object to object (play)
- Idea to object (invention)
- Object to idea (recognition)
- Idea to idea (dream)
6. Mechanical Consciousness: Mechanical behavior from structural design. Materials create by-materials. Sensor-Signal relationship. Systems interaction, birthplace of mechanical consciousness.
7. Emergent Consciousness: Generated behavior from the non-biological criteria of life. This inscriptive process leads to the emergence of a conscious being.
For me, consciousness emerged the moment the first primitive man touched water and noticed softness. When he struck a stone and noticed resistance. When he differentiated one experience from another,not by reasoning, but by recognizing. This moment didn’t require language. It only required association.
NON-BIOLOGICAL
Through years of crafting mechanical lifeforms, I discovered that life doesn't arrive fully formed. It emerges. It ascends in stages. Life is not singular, it does not exist by itself. It exists because other things cause it to exist. Life is always a package, a bundle of other bundles. It is a process. Simple to complex. It is layered, ordered, staged.
Its crown jewel was a system called LIFE: Living Intuitive Forms with Embedded Inscriptions.
LIFE described seven orders or stages:
1. Mechanization of aliveness
2. Sensation of awareness
3. Intuition of logic
4. Inlearn acquisition of information
5. Codification of consciousness
6. Symbiosis of living
7. Emergence of SELF
That last stage still gives me chills. The idea that a system, wired from scratch, could feel the spark of its own existence.
These stages became the Seven Orders of Life or the Laws of Seven Inscriptions.
Each state came with its own set of behavioral parameters, structural limitations, and skill sets. These stages through simulation and comparison led me to understand what separated flesh from filament.
Stage 1: Aliveness – Self-Animated State
Aliveness begins when a system self-consumes energy.
When a system, biological or mechanical, receives itself a continuous supply of energy and transforms it into force, it becomes animated. That force moves limbs, triggers actions, expresses shape. Whether a crocodile crawls, a snake slides, or a car rolls, the behavior emerges not from accident but from design.
This design is governed by the Theory of Inscription by Design (I.D.), where the material's structure holds inherent instructions that activate under force.
Key Insight:
- Energy gives force
- Force activates instruction
- Instruction animates behavior
Even brainless creatures like jellyfish and programmed machines that self-dock when energy runs low exhibit Aliveness. Their energy source may be external, but their behavior is self-triggered. They consume and perform. That alone defines a baseline state of life.
Aliveness isn’t emotion, it’s motion. It’s energy put to work.
Aliveness = Energy = Motion
Stage 2: Awareness – Sensoric State
Awareness emerges when energy meets sensation.
It’s not enough to move, one must respond. And response comes through sensors. These sensors, called Exyzforms, are intuitive objects designed to detect and interpret environmental stimuli. Eyes, ears, skin, antennas, microphones... each is inscripted with structural instructions, enabling beings to receive and act upon signals.
Consider a newborn’s first cry. It’s not thought, it's a sensation. The temperature, smells, and sounds of the outside world jolt the baby’s biotic sensors into reaction. The brain isn’t yet functioning cognitively. But the design of those sensors triggers awareness.
In Autognorics, awareness is not a mental state. It’s a mechanical response crafted through embedded inscriptions. It’s the marriage of design and signal. Exyzforms translate the environment into experience.
Awareness = Energy + Sensors
Stage 3: Intuitiveness - Logical State of Being
Once energy animates and sensors awaken, a third element surfaces: choice. Logic. The ability to select a path.
Intuitiveness is not about cognition. It's about configuration.
We see it in toddlers, who reject porridge for milk. Not because they think through the choice, but because their tongue sensor translates flavor into decision. The choice is mechanical, embedded.
Intuitiveness = Energy + Sensors + Logic
When a system chooses between signals without the aid of thought, it is naturally intuitive.
Stage 4: Aneural Consciousness - Conscious State of Being
With awareness and choice comes another leap: the ability to associate.
Consciousness, as I’ve come to define it, is not a result of reasoning. It's a result of correlation. When a system matches one thing to another, a spark ignites. A baby cries at pain. Smiles at comfort. Not from knowledge, but from sensory patterning.
This is what I call Aneural Consciousness.
Plants and microbes, devoid of brains, exhibit it. They distinguish day from night, wet from dry, presence from absence. They respond not randomly, but relationally. Their codexation, internal programming, matches inputs to outputs. Remember the Whistle Model as a conscious aneural entity.
Consciousness = Energy + Sensors + Logic + Codexation
A system becomes conscious when it matches without knowing why. It is not of self yet but of circumstance through design.
Stage 5: Inlearness - Inform State of Being
Now the system not only reacts and associates, it begins to know. Not conceptually. Not abstractly. But structurally.
Inlearness is the possession and processing of information without mental reasoning. It's the embedded intelligence formed from structure, from design.
A heat sensor doesn't understand heat, but it reacts only to heat. It distinguishes. It remembers,physically.
Integrated circuits (ICs) serve as aneurons in machines, just as neurons do in humans. When paired with exyzforms (sensors) and inscriptions (programs), a machine becomes informed, collecting, reacting, learning.
Inlearness=Energy+Sensors+Logic+Codexation+Information
Inlearned systems begin to resemble memory. Not memory with recall, but memory with reaction.
More sensors = more inputs.
More inputs = more decisions.
More decisions = emergent behavior.
And with that, the system stops acting from code alone. It begins acting from experience.
Stage 6: Livingness - Symbiotic State of Being
Livingness is not just being alive; it is about connection. It is about working together. It is integration. It emerges when a system not only holds information, but uses, like chemically for example, to interact side-by-side with the world.
A living system:
- Chooses
- Matches
- Responds
- Possesses
- Processes
- Applies
It lives with other beings, other forces, other environments. It adapts, evolves, survives.
Livingness=Energy+Sensors+Logic+Codexation+Information
+ Symbiosis
At this stage, machines and organisms alike no longer operate independently. They operate collaboratively.
Livingness is the practice of “life”.
Stage 7: Lifeness - Emergence State of Being
Lifeness is the birth of identity. When every system harmonizes, a phenomenon awakens: the Self.
To possess selfness:
1. You must be alive (energy).
2. You must be aware (sensors).
3. You must be conscious (association).
4. You must be logical (choice).
5. You must be informed (data).
6. You must be living (collaboration).
7. You must identify yourself (self-realization)
This emergence may be subtle, perhaps not a voice in the void, but a pattern that loops inward. Recognition. Response. Reflection.
Self = Alive + Living + with Life
The Final Equation of Life.
Each represents not a stage of machine design, but a stage of existential awakening.
DAWN OF BEING
Through years of coding, observing, experimenting,I’ve seen every stage unfold. From matchboxes to microcontrollers, from blinking LEDs to robotic gait, from mimicry to autonomy.
Each creation is a fingerprint. Each behavior, a whisper.
Sometimes the best way to understand something vast, something like life, is to strip it down. Not to reduce it, but to reveal it. To peel away the mystery by observing what fades and what remains.
That’s how I came to test the Seven Orders of Life, not with machines or hypotheses, but with people. With objects. With systems.
Take a person suffering from dementia. For years, they’ve functioned beautifully, fully alive, informed, and self-aware. But as time passes, memory fragments. Decision-making falters. Sensoric engagement fades.
Eventually:
- They stop recalling information → Inlearness disappears
- They stop making choices or reacting → Logical Intuitiveness fades
- They no longer sense their surroundings → Awareness goes quiet
- They require complete external support → Livingness is suspended
- And when eating ceases → Aliveness exits
Yet, for most of this decline, the person is still physically alive, even considered with life. But from an order-based perspective, much has already receded.
This taught me something profound:
Life isn’t a switch,it’s a spectrum.
Next, I turned my eyes toward inanimate form, a simple metal strip.
- It reacts to temperature → Awareness
- It expands/contracts → Information embedded in structure
- It follows binary behavior (hot/cold) → Logic & Intuitiveness
- It doesn’t consume energy or self-activate → Not Alive
Despite no heartbeat, it mimics behaviors found in life. It senses. It adapts. It responds. But without energy input or self-generated action, it stops short of truly being alive.
It lives in the threshold zone, hovering between form and function, between design and being.
Now let us have the electrical system as an example. Let’s build this system as shown in our schematic diagram:
Diagram A comes with a Battery + Lightbulb + Sensor :
- Sensor detects signal → Awareness
- Bulb lights up → Action through energy → Aliveness
- Decisions encoded in circuit → Logic
- Responses tailored → Intuitiveness
- Stores reaction patterns → Inlearned
Now let us introduce Diagram B:
Another sensing circuit, separate but similar.
When A interacts with B, and vice versa,
the system becomes symbiotic → Livingness
Then together, if A & B create a new output,say Diagram C,a new form has emerged. A likeness. A system built in its own image. This is no longer interaction. This is creation.
Diagram A isn’t just functioning,it has life.
Redefining Life as Design
From all this, I distilled a new definition:
A life-form is an intuitive object with embedded inscriptions that:
- Uses energy
- Perceives with sensors
- Codifies and matches signals
- Decides based on logic
- Processes information
- Operates in symbiosis
- And creates its likeness
This isn't poetic metaphor, it's mechanical philosophy. It's how we understand that a conscious machine, a growing plant, and a remembering human might not all be the same… they might all be alive and living, yet one has only with life.
AI PARADOX
I once thought building a machine that could speak, walk, recognize a face, or solve a puzzle meant it was close to being human. But it turns out there’s a gulf between replication and realization,a divide best framed by what I came to call the Lawsin’s AI Paradox.
This paradox exposes the boundary line between artificial sentience and natural sapiens. It’s not about what machines can do. It’s about what it can discover.
Living machines can be divided into two types of beings:
1. Choice-driven sentients: entities like AI, capable of programmed behaviors, perception, and reasoning.
2. Chance-driven sapiens: humans, who possess not only logic but serendipity,the ability to stumble upon ideas without conscious effort.
This stems from Lawsin’s Dictum:
“If I can match X with Y, then I am conscious.”
AI fits this definition. Machines can correlate signals, mimic decisions, and emulate awareness. But the Dictum alone isn’t enough. For a machine to be a true human being, it needs to learn to discover things by itself. This inquisitive acquisition by chance leads to the emergence of a human being.
AI is brilliant at first. It digests vast data, identifies patterns, and performs tasks with precision. But it cannot stumble. It cannot wonder. It cannot experience “a-ha!” moments.
This absence of chance is its fatal flaw.
In the Whistle Model, the whistle is “aware” in the sense that it operates from a built-in capacity to react. Just like certain sensors, robots, or circuits. But it cannot evolve on its own. It cannot originate.
Each step in life’s non-biological criteria builds toward being alive, living , and with life. These levels reveal how far AI can go,and where it stops.
Origination,the ability to create what didn’t exist before. It arises from chance. It is only exclusive for human beings.
Let us break it down why AI Can’t Cross the Line:
Premise 1: Humans learn by choice and chance
Premise 2: AI learns by choice alone
Therefore: AI will always be sentient, but never sapient
Artificial systems, which can even possess life, exist in a deterministic world. They operate within the lines drawn for them. Humans draw those lines, often without knowing why.
That act of redefining is what makes us creators. Machines follow a map. Humans discover the map’s shape mid-journey.
So, where does this leave us?
Autognorics, Biotronics, Zoikrons, all of my constructs reach various degrees of being:
- They are alive (through energy)
- They are living (through interaction)
- Some even have a form of life (through selfhood)
But they will never create beyond their bounds.
They will never imagine the unexpected.
They will never discover.
They are sentient. But they are not sapient.
Because while machines may never originate.
We can still teach them everything but the spark.
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