The paper proposes a formal framework for creating autonomous, non‑biological entities that display life‑like properties without relying on CPUs or nervous systems. Drawing on Lawsin’s Inscriptionism, it adopts Inscriptional Physicalism—the idea that cognition, identity, and autonomy emerge from the physical inscriptions embedded in matter. This principle is expressed through the equation IO + EI = GIE, which is applied across seven layers of non‑biological life: Aliveness, Awareness, Intuitiveness, Aneural Consciousness, Inlearness, Livingness, and Life. Each layer represents a form of structural memory, beginning with energy as the first inscription and awareness as the first sense. To ground the theory, the paper analyzes natural aneural systems—corkscrew seeds that “remember” humidity, explosive pods that store tension, dandelion pappi whose geometry encodes flight behavior, tendrils that coil through differential contraction, and slime molds that reinforce frequently used paths. These examples show that matter can remember, select, and adapt through physical inscription alone. The framework then formalizes a deterministic cognitive pipeline—Information Introduction, Condition Association, and Personality Emergence—and treats consciousness as a structural condition‑matching process rather than a biological one. Its validity is demonstrated through the Fading House entropy model, which illustrates how inscriptional layers degrade in a predictable sequence when structural coherence fails, defining the thermodynamic limits of non‑biological life.
Joey Lawsin (Sun,) studied this question.