Why Artificial Life and Consciousness Are Impossible in Principle

Abstract

This essay develops an argument for the principled, not merely practical, impossibility of producing artificial life and artificial consciousness. The impossibility follows from the convergence of several lines of reasoning: from the nature of scientific abstraction, which always yields a map and never the landscape itself; from the size and branching structure of the evolutionary space of possibilities; from the active path-production of living systems, which continually co-produce their own space of possibilities rather than traversing a pre-given one; from the operative closure of biological autocatalysis, which shifts the concept away from the ahistorical, organizational reading of autopoiesis toward a historical-causal path thesis; and from the claim that ontology is the epistemic determination of the ontic, whereby the epistemic and ontological inaccessibility of the path collapse into one. The central aporia: construction presupposes a factorized description, yet what is causally relevant in the living is precisely its non-factorizability. The argument requires no assumption of a phenomenal residue separable from function and takes hold one step earlier, at the logical form of construction itself.