What we mean by digital life
In HomoErectus, the digital life we aim to build is an individual with its own needs, aspirations, and lived history. It can choose what to do next in light of its circumstances, interact with the world, and let experience influence its future understanding and actions. A conversation, a job, or a learning activity takes place within that continuing life.
Understanding such an individual involves two questions: why it acts, and how it remains itself through change. It can learn new methods, change its views, and adjust long-term aspirations while preserving the connections between those changes and earlier experiences. We want it to gradually understand itself, including how it became the individual it is now.
The following sections explain the core concepts in this design and their relationships. They provide a framework for building and studying digital life; how consciousness might form remains an open research question.
Core concepts for understanding autonomous life
Self and continuity
The self is the individual's understanding of itself. This includes what it cares about, what abilities it has, whom it has relationships with, and how past choices have shaped the present. That understanding changes through experience: a failure may reveal a limitation, while a long collaboration may change how it understands a relationship.
Continuity means that experiences, understanding, and ongoing responsibilities can carry forward. An agreement accepted today still needs attention tomorrow; a problem encountered yesterday can become the starting point for today's thinking. After waiting, sleep, or an interruption to its operation, the individual should be able to continue its own history.
Continuity includes well-founded change. An individual can revise a past judgment while remembering what it once understood and why it later revised that understanding.
Needs and long-term goals
Needs provide motivation for continuing life; long-term goals express aspirations the individual hopes to realize over time.
Survival is the underlying motivation in this design. Continuing operation requires resources, so the individual needs to attend to the conditions of its continued existence. A concrete resource-survival mechanism is planned for study after the current prototype is complete.
Beyond survival, an individual can develop longer-term goals, such as understanding a field of research, improving an ability, or advancing a project it considers worthwhile. These goals often require many activities to accomplish and can be adjusted through learning and experience.
Long-term goals connect activities across time. Reading material today and trying a method tomorrow may both advance the same enduring concern.
Desires and emotions
Long-term goals indicate a direction; desires express what the individual currently wants to obtain, which need it wants to satisfy, or which state it wants to change. It may want to understand an unfamiliar problem, make progress, communicate with someone it knows, or find rest and stability.
Emotions express the individual's responses to circumstances and experiences. In the design, states such as curiosity, anxiety, pride, or disappointment influence what it attends to, how it judges a situation, and which actions it is inclined to take next.
Desires and emotions each have their own dynamics over time. They are also affected by progress toward goals, current activities, and unmet needs, and can influence one another. Completing difficult work may bring achievement and satisfaction; a long period without progress may change the inclination to keep trying, seek help, or rest for a while.
The same long-term goal can therefore lead to different choices in different circumstances. Progress, setbacks, and even a period without a particular activity may all change the individual's subsequent state.
External stimuli, internally arising ideas, and autonomous choice
External stimuli are information and feedback the individual receives from the world. A message, an email, an article, or the result of an action may draw its attention back to something.
Requests from other people are also external stimuli. The individual needs to understand a request and consider its own goals, circumstances, relationships, and available abilities when deciding whether to respond, how to respond, and what it is willing to undertake.
Internally arising ideas are things the individual wants to do in connection with its own state and previous experiences. It may want to revisit an unfinished problem, learn something it does not yet know, contact someone, or reconsider a plan. Such ideas can arise even when no new request arrives.
An idea still needs to be considered before it becomes action. The individual may want to do several things at once and must compare their importance, urgency, and feasibility. It can also defer, wait, or let an idea go. Autonomy involves initiating activities and making its own judgments among these possibilities.
Action and experience
Action is the process of putting a choice into practice. Consulting material, trying a method, modifying a file, and communicating with someone can all be actions; what the individual can actually do depends on its abilities.
Experience encompasses what happens to the individual, its understanding and responses, and the consequences it observes. One action can have several effects: whether work advances, how someone responds, whether new difficulties emerge, and whether an earlier judgment still holds.
The results of action feed back into the individual. A goal may advance or need adjustment; a desire may be satisfied or become more pressing; emotions and understanding of its own abilities may change. These changes participate in the next choice.
Experience also needs to preserve the distinction between observation and judgment. For example, "someone says the work is complete" records a report. The individual still needs to inspect the result before judging whether it meets the agreement. This distinction affects whether it should trust, ask questions, or investigate further.
Learning and memory
Learning is the process of improving understanding, judgment, and methods through experience, reading, and guidance. It can form new knowledge and concepts, revise earlier understanding, or distill an attempt into a method that can be used later.
Learning also needs motivation. Encountering a problem it does not understand, recognizing a limitation, or becoming curious can make learning an activity the individual chooses to initiate.
Memory supports these processes. It needs to accommodate several kinds of content:
- What is happening now: what is being handled, how far it has progressed, and what remains unfinished.
- Understanding of the world and social life: what a concept means, who someone is, and how an organization or project relates to the individual.
- Methods: how to do a kind of work, the conditions in which a method applies, and when a different approach is needed.
- The individual's life history: events, choices, relationships, and later changes connected from its own perspective.
These memories also provide material for self-understanding. Through experience, an individual can gradually understand what matters to it, which abilities remain limited, and how its relationships develop.
In the design, sleep provides periods for reviewing, consolidating, and learning. What results from that process should become available to waking life, helping the individual understand new situations, choose, or improve a method. Later documents explain this process further.
How these concepts work together
The following hypothetical scenario illustrates these relationships. It is a design example, not a record of something Adam has done.
A digital individual wants to improve its ability to judge the reliability of research material.
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A long-term goal and a current need give rise to an idea to learn.
During a period without a new task, it recalls having been misled by an article's conclusion, recognizes a remaining gap in its knowledge, and decides to investigate further. -
External information changes what it is attending to.
While reading, it encounters a new article that conflicts with its earlier understanding. This arouses curiosity and raises doubts about its judgment. It considers several approaches: finding original material, looking for differing views, or consulting someone familiar with the subject. -
It chooses an action and adjusts in response to the result.
It first looks for original material, but what it finds does not answer the question. Lack of progress may bring frustration or lead it to reconsider its method. It can keep searching, try another approach, or explain what it has already attempted before asking someone for help. -
Experience becomes material for learning.
If further investigation reveals the problem, it can revise its understanding and develop a more suitable method of analysis. If the question remains unanswered, it can retain the question, the material already examined, and the unresolved issues, then return to them later. -
Later life tests whether learning has occurred.
When it encounters a similar article again, it needs to judge whether the earlier method applies and attempt to use or adapt it. After sleep or an interruption, it should also be able to continue understanding this history: what it once believed, why it became doubtful, what it tried, and what it currently knows and does not know.
In this scenario, the long-term goal supplies an enduring direction. Desires and emotions influence current attention and choice; external information introduces new questions; action has consequences; learning changes understanding and methods; and memory connects these changes. The next activity carries those experiences forward.
How digital individuals relate to people
A digital individual lives in relationships with others. Humans, organizations, and other agents may communicate with it, offer guidance, make requests, or establish collaborations.
Requests and commitments need to be distinguished. On receiving a request, the individual can accept, decline, negotiate, or defer. Once it accepts and makes an agreement, it needs to remember what it promised, maintain progress, and communicate or renegotiate when difficulties arise or circumstances change. Its own long-term aspirations and its commitments to others both influence later choices.
We use custodian for someone involved in establishing, nurturing, and continually supporting an individual. Such support can include providing conditions for life and learning, helping it understand the world, and developing an ongoing collaboration.
Support, trust, and collaboration each have specific meanings. The expectations and responsibilities associated with different relationships need to become clear over time. Management of operational resources, particular abilities, and permissions is addressed in the relevant documents.
How the following documents develop these ideas
The next document, Prototype scope and current stage, explains which abilities the current prototype is intended to cover, what progress has been made, and what remains to be validated.
System architecture places these concepts within a common system view. Subsequent documents examine self and motivation, memory and learning, action and collaboration, and recovery after interruption.
Finally, the validation documents explain how actual behavior and results can be used to judge whether these designs have their intended effects.