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\title{Semantic Autopoiesis:\\
An Engineering Roadmap for Machine Life}
\author{Keren Dong\\Kungfu Origin Technology Limited\\
\href{mailto:keren.dong@kungfu.link}{keren.dong@kungfu.link}}
\date{Alpha 0.1.0-alpha.4 --- July 2026}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
Machine life need not begin when a model becomes generally intelligent or a
robot becomes human-shaped. This paper examines a different threshold: a
bounded machine organization that preserves a continuing subject, metabolizes
technical resources, acts in its environment, and governs the production of
its own successor organization. Its body can initially be inelegant and
server-scale, assembled from operating systems, compilers, build tools,
caches, gates, source code, executable extensions, networks, and replaceable
reasoning agents.

We call the organizing principle \emph{semantic autopoiesis}: the governed
production of successor executable organization while identity, direction,
admitted facts, authority, and admission rules remain continuous. The proposal
has two jointly necessary mechanisms. A semantic kernel preserves the subject
across process, model, organ, and machine replacement. Recursive dogfood lets
that subject use its current engineering organization to develop, qualify,
admit, and exercise changes to the mechanisms of its own future work. KFD and
Kungfu provide a concrete implementation path: replaceable agents supply
cognition, KFX extensions act as organs, and Buildchain-like qualification
turns candidate self-modifications into bounded successor states.

A dated Kungfu snapshot contains substantial parts of this loop, including
durable work identity, qualified executable bodies, verified history
selection, KFX qualification, recursive dogfood, a daily Agent Patrol that
captures bounded failures as Dogfood Findings, and a governed Deprecation
Lifecycle for retiring obsolete surfaces. Together they constitute a partial,
bounded homeostatic architecture with genuine but primitive self-maintenance
capacity. They do not yet establish a completed organism: several control-loop
edges and longitudinal survival trials remain unproven. We therefore present a
staged architecture and falsifiable tests for continuity, self-maintenance,
adaptation, bounded autonomy, recovery, and human intervention. The claim is
specific: ordinary software engineering materials may already be sufficient
to construct and experimentally study a primitive form of machine life. It is
not a claim of biological equivalence, sentience, phenomenal consciousness, or
unrestricted autonomy.
\end{abstract}

\input{sections/01-introduction}
\input{sections/02-life-as-an-engineering-property}
\input{sections/03-semantic-kernel}
\input{sections/04-recursive-dogfood}
\input{sections/05-material-anatomy}
\input{sections/06-kungfu-evidence}
\input{sections/07-prototype-and-roadmap}
\input{sections/08-evaluation-and-safety}
\input{sections/09-related-work}
\input{sections/10-discussion}
\input{sections/11-conclusion}

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