Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we consider the most minimal abstract pure clocks and investigate their characteristics with respect to their ability to measure time. Amongst other, we find fundamentally diametral clock characteristics, such as oscillatory behaviour for local time measurement or decay-based clocks measuring time periods in scales global to the problem. We include also cascades of independent clocks (“clock bags”) and composite clocks with controlled dependency; the latter show various regimes of markedly different dynamics.

The enactive AI framework wants to overcome the sense-making limitations of embodied AI by drawing on the bio-systemic foundations of enactive cognitive science. While embodied AI tries to ground meaning in sensorimotor interaction, enactive AI adds further requirements by grounding sensorimotor interaction in autonomous agency. At the core of this shift is the requirement for a truly intrinsic value function. We suggest that empowerment, an information-theoretic quantity based on an agents embodiment, represents such a function. We highlight the role of empowerment maximisation in satisfying the requirements of enactive AI, i.e. establishing constitutive autonomy and adaptivity, in detail. We then argue that empowerment, grounded in a precarious existence, allows an agent to enact a world based on the relevance of environmental features in respect to its own identity.