I got my tamagotchi about a year ago. They pronounced it wrong when they brought em over to America but I wasn’t that upset. What did bother me most about the little thing however was the lack of its character depth. I thought I was really gonna be in for a treat when I had this thing – a real live pet for you to take care of! Well, that awe lasted about half a day, until I figured out how it worked. It was simply a few variables, timed to appreciate and depreciate over time. Once you’ve isolated all its functions, it’s hard not to belittle it into anything more than mimicking the fun of setting your watch.

Upon finding that the tamagotchi was so bland, I decided to try to make my own artificial intelligence, just for the hell of it. I had no idea what the means were to produce it physically, I simply wanted to see how hard philosophically it would be to create life.  I started by assuming that all life need things to survive as an absolute standard, so a person would have to take care of it and so forth. So, I found myself a few minutes later tracking down a variable every possible need it would ever have. I quickly figured this would be more trouble than it’s worth, since regardless of how many variables it would ever have, all it would ever essentially be is a complex tamagotchi; something you provide for and is either happy or unhappy.

True life is much more than that; upon diverging from this variable-oriented system I found that life is different because it is adaptable. Every creature has the power to adapt to its situations according to darwinian evolution, the same way an eskimo child is raised and has different tolerances than a brazilian child.

Ah, there was that word, tolerance. The more I thought about it, the more I found that tolerance was really the only variable I needed in this equation. A life form can build up its adaptability by starting it off at first to be fully adaptable to anything, then as it matures, its variable system (its intellect) will mold around its experiences, and therefore develop tolerances. A nerdy child is more prone to reading books and that sort of thing, which could be accounted for by his tolerance to books when he was growing up.  By the same token, a jock could have more of a tolerance for sports because his father forced him into it from a very young age.  According to a life form’s tolerances, biases and emotions will emerge, and behavior will follow.

So, now I knew what my artificial life form’s root program (its kernel) was to be constructed from. I just didn’t know how to implement it.  I realized that by coding a kernel, I would be in a sense limiting it by some degree, since I originally stated that any molding I make for it will prohibit what its potential could be. When I though about it on extreme terms, a life source within me has no real code to itself, it simply ‘is’. There is no definite sense that tells my life source to grow or to accept or reject tolerances, it simply exists, even though I can’t prove or disprove it.

A while later, i found this to be untrue.. we do have operands in ourselves, most people simply can't recognize them for what they are. The conscious mind operates as a butt end of all the rest of the mind's work, like a CEO speaking for every worker of a company.  These little fragments of the mind are collected and stored over the years, especially when a person is maturing. Still, i felt i had missed the point here. I could code my AI like this; to latch onto certain instances andstore tham as emotional caches, but still it went deeper than that.  There is a catalyst inside each of us (some call it a soul) that is there from the moment of birth, that starts everything off. regardless of wisdom, tolerance, or any other variable that i could code, this would require me to code reality itself, and to do that i'd need to be outside or at least above reality to understand it the way we understand human creation (art) currently.

Upon realizing this, I stopped my plans for developing an artificial life form. It became apparent to me that life energy is something that I will probably never understand, since it goes above the human experience for grasping concepts. The only real way to know you are alive is to die, since it seems to be the only way to compare your life energy to what it was before and after the transition. Unfortunately, I’m not willing to die for my project, so my knowledge of life energy is limited.

If I were to code an artificial life form, it would be flawed – somehow, in a way I would never know, it would be subservient to life as I know you and i. Since its pseudo life energy would be constructued of feeble knowledge of what I have observed about life, it could never truly be life itself, only a cheap imitation. Lifeforms as we know them exist on a level we deem to be living only because we do not know what life is or what has given us life. If I were to create life out of code, it would be one step lower than this, since it is my creation. Without that extra step pushing it into something above us, it could only be below us, and therefore no matter how complex it is, people would only figure it out and belittle it, given time. It can never be more than a tamagotchi.