Exploring the Adaptive Behaviors of Particle Lenia: A Perturbation-Response Analysis for Computational Agency

A firm cognitive subject or individual'' is presupposed for the emergence of mind. However, with the development of recent information technology, the individual’’ has become more dispersed in society and the cognitive subject has become increasingly unstable and adaptive, necessitating an update in our understanding of the ``individual’'. Autopoiesis serves as a model of the cognitive subject, which is unstable and requires effort to maintain itself to adapt to the environment. In this study, we evaluated adaptivity for a highly extensible multi-particle system model Particle Lenia through the response perturbation. As a result, we found that Particle Lenia has a particle configuration that is both temporally unstable and has multiple stable states. This result suggests that Particle Lenia can express adaptive characteristics and is expected to be used as a computational model toward building an autopoietic cognitive agent.