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.

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