Principia Vita v0.2

Toward a Natural Philosophy of Life

From Axiomata Vitae to Problemata Vitae

Toward ≠ Arrival.

Prologue｜Life is not given.

Life is not given.

This sentence appeared at the beginning of Principia Vita v0.1.
It remains here.

But its status has changed.

In v0.1, the sentence opened an inquiry that proceeded toward seven Axiomata Vitae and, finally, toward a fundamental definition of life.

This version does not proceed in the same way.

To say that life is not given does not mean that life must therefore be defined.

Nor does the use of the word Life establish that there is already a natural entity, boundary, unit, structure, or criterion corresponding to that word.

Here, Life is first of all declared target-language.

The same caution applies to Matter.

To ask how, if at all, Matter comes to be called Life already places two words on the page. Their presence on the page does not establish their boundary in nature.

The inquiry therefore begins again.

Not from nothing.

From traces.

Methodological Note｜From restraint to movement

This version does not replace the seven Axiomata Vitae of v0.1 with seven new axioms.

It reopens them as Problemata Vitae.

Here, Problemata does not mean a collection of problems whose proper destination is solution.

A Problema may remain a Problema.

The vocabulary used below is declared rather than naturalized. Attractions that emerge during inquiry are recorded without being promoted to evidence.

The sequence of presentation records an order of excavation. That order is retained because it is itself a trace of the inquiry. It is not rearranged merely to produce a cleaner conceptual architecture.

The order below therefore does not claim an order in nature, a logical priority among the probes, or an order of importance.

The inquiry nevertheless moves.

A question may expose another question.
A distinction may make another distinction difficult to avoid.
A failed definition may change where the inquiry goes next.

These movements are recorded as movements of inquiry.

They are not presented as derivations in nature.

Methodological restraint does not require immobility.

The inquiry may move without declaring in advance where it must arrive.

I｜Axiomata Vitae as Historical Scaffold

Principia Vita v0.1 proposed seven axioms:

These propositions are not erased.

They are retained as a historical scaffold.

The inquiry that followed them exposed difficulties in nearly every term:

The difficulty is not simply that the axioms were false.

Something more interesting happened.

Each answer began to multiply questions.

The seven axioms therefore no longer function here as foundations from which a definition will be derived.

They remain as traces of where the inquiry once stood.

II｜Problemata Vitae

Life-language?

The inquiry repeatedly asks where Life begins.

But the question itself contains Life before Life has been located.

Likewise, it contains Matter before the relation between Matter and Life has been established.

This does not make the question unusable.

It makes its vocabulary visible.

A boundary may be explicit in a source.
It may be implicit in a reading.
There may be no boundary of the kind the inquiry expected to find.

But:

The first problem of life may therefore be partly a problem of life-language.

Who called this Life?

When?

From what vocabulary?

And what did that naming make easier to see—or easier to overlook?

Encounter / Persistence?

v0.1 proposed:

The subsequent inquiry weakened both sides of this formulation.

Matter encounters matter.

Matter may enter repeated or conditionally persistent relations.

Protocells interact, but even there:

Likewise:

The conjunction does not solve the problem.

The inquiry therefore moved.

Not toward another definition, but toward a question:

Matter?

Pattern?

Relation?

Difference?

Trace?

The last word is especially attractive.

That attraction is recorded.

It is not evidence.

Change / Maintenance?

v0.1 placed generation and preservation in circulation and later described life as maintaining phase transition.

The distinction became unstable under examination.

What exactly is generated?

What exactly is preserved?

And what does maintenance maintain?

Protocell inquiry exposed a weaker formulation:

But this was source-bounded.

It did not establish a universal principle of life.

More importantly:

To say that something changed does not yet say that something was updated.

The latter immediately exposes another question:

Likewise:

A membrane may expose an inside.

It does not thereby tell us what the enduring WHAT is.

The inquiry therefore moved from maintenance to traceability.

THIS?

Protocell inquiry exposed a small and dangerous word:

A protocell may change its components.

It may grow.

Its membrane composition may change.

Its internal contents may change.

It may divide.

Yet an experimental object may remain trackable across some of these changes.

This does not establish persistent identity.

Nor does a boundary establish a self.

The question that emerged was therefore deliberately weak:

This is a traceability probe.

It is not yet an ontology of the individual.

Indeed, division makes the problem stranger:

A This may cease to be trackable as this This while relations generated through it remain available for subsequent description.

This does not solve THIS.

It prevents THIS from becoming too strong too early.

Intake?

v0.1 proposed:

The formulation is now too compressed.

Difference can enter a system without anything appropriately called eating having occurred.

Therefore:

Even ingestion requires caution.

It appears to invite:

and each of these remains under inquiry.

A broader cluster nevertheless became difficult to ignore:

Their order here records excavation.

It does not establish a universal process sequence.

Nor has any one of these been established as uniquely characteristic of life.

The inquiry moved because intake alone proved insufficient.

Something that takes in may also retain.

Something retained may be changed.

Something may cease to be retained.

And some things may not be taken in at all.

Hunger?

At this point, intake exposed a different problem.

Life does not merely ingest.

Life also appears capable of lacking.

The relevant Piece may not currently be present.

Yet its absence may matter to the present relation.

This exposed:

and with it:

But absence alone is insufficient.

A non-living process may cease when a reactant or energy source is depleted.

Therefore:

The question becomes stranger.

How can something not currently present participate in the description of what happens now?

Does Absent already imply Not Yet?

Not necessarily.

The inquiry moved again.

Hunger made another word difficult to avoid:

Food for what?

Necessary for what?

Good for what?

But FOR carries functional and teleological attractions.

It is therefore not promoted.

Rejection?

Difference introduction also failed for another reason.

Not every difference is ingested.

Not everything ingested is retained.

Something may be expelled.

Something encountered again may not be ingested again.

Something previously associated with a consequence may later be avoided.

A playful sequence exposed the problem:

first — expel?
again — do not ingest?
later — avoid?

This is not proposed as a universal biological sequence.

It is a development probe.

Its significance lies elsewhere.

A Piece does not appear to contain its future consequence inside itself.

Likewise:

at least if food and toxin name relational consequences rather than intrinsic identities.

That “if” remains important.

The inquiry has not yet earned a general theory of Piecehood.

But rejection exposed something intake alone concealed.

The inquiry therefore had to consider not only taking in, but not taking in, releasing, and perhaps changing what happens at another encounter.

Latency?

v0.1 stated that when the relevant circulation ceases, life ends.

Dormancy makes that statement difficult to maintain without qualification.

Seeds.

Spores.

Dormant forms.

Hibernation.

Encounter latency.

These do not all name the same phenomenon.

Their grouping here is itself a probe.

But together they prevent an immediate equation:

The problem becomes sharper at starvation.

A non-living process may stop when resources disappear.

But:

The comic phrasing hides a serious distinction.

These terms cannot yet be collapsed into one transition from activity to inactivity.

Latency therefore interrupts any definition of life based solely on continuous observable circulation.

AGAIN?

Repeated processes occur in matter.

Replication occurs in RNA systems.

Growth and division occur in protocell systems.

Therefore repetition alone cannot establish life.

Yet repetition may not always be merely repetition.

A prior difference may alter what happens in a subsequent relation.

This is where Trace becomes attractive again.

But:

and:

GAIN? is retained only as a Development Probe.

It names, provisionally, that something happened—that a difference occurred.

It does not itself carry lag, retention, persistence, memory, or future effect.

Those belong to other questions.

AGAIN also exposed irreversibility.

Something happened.

Another relation occurs.

But what, exactly, cannot return?

A material state?

An event?

A This?

A relation?

A description?

A Trace?

Protocell inquiry already warned that these may separate:

Irreversibility therefore cannot yet be treated as a single property.

FOR NEXT?

The excavation eventually produced a compact and suspicious phrase:

Both important words are under arrest. 🤣

FOR? risks importing function, value, or purpose.

Next? risks importing temporal syntax and an ordered continuation not yet established by the phenomenon itself.

So the phrase is not a definition.

It is a probe generated by the inquiry.

A weaker sequence can be written:

But change for next seems to ask something additional:

Can a change matter differently because another relation can occur?

And if so, what licenses the word for?

No answer is supplied here.

The question is retained because the difference between those formulations may matter.

III｜Trace, Boundary, and the Problem of WHAT

Across these Problemata, several questions repeatedly intersect.

One concerns boundary:

But:

and:

Another concerns WHAT:

It is tempting to answer:

or:

or:

The temptation is recorded.

The answer is withheld.

A third concerns Trace.

Trace is useful here only if it does not become a hidden substance.

It is not simply sequence.

Not simply memory.

Not simply information.

Not simply retained matter.

The current TUP vocabulary attracts the formulation:

But this remains declared theoretical vocabulary.

Trace may guide the reading.

That does not make Trace the primordial stuff of life.

IV｜From THIS? to NEVER THIS?

During the excavation another phrase appeared:

It is not a definition.

It is a Development Probe.

Its attraction comes from several observations already separated above:

and from the broader problem of irreversibility.

A weak temporal sketch appeared:

But each term carries more than has been established.

before is temporal syntax.

next is unresolved.

this is a traceability probe.

never risks collapsing several kinds of irreversibility.

Therefore the phrase remains where it first appeared:

not as conclusion,

but as a place worth returning to.

V｜Development Notes

The following terms are retained with deliberately unequal status.

The unequal labels are intentional.

They record different excavation histories.

They are not stages in a common progression.

VI｜Fundamental Definition | Withheld

v0.1 ended by deriving a Fundamental Definition of Life.

v0.2 does not replace it with another.

This withholding is not a conclusion that life cannot be defined.

Nor is it a claim that definitions are useless.

It records the present evidential and conceptual status of this inquiry.

The old definition remains visible as a historical scaffold.

The new excavation has not yet produced grounds for another.

Yet appears here only as a statement about the current inquiry.

It is not a property of Life.

Conclusion｜Problemata remain

Life is not given.

Neither is its boundary.

But neither sentence requires the inquiry to stop.

The inquiry moved through:

and then through:

and again through:

This order records an excavation.

It does not describe the order of nature.

No new Axiomata Vitae are proposed here.

No new Fundamental Definition is submitted.

Instead, this version preserves where the previous definition opened, where its vocabulary became unstable, and where new probes appeared.

A move need not terminate in an answer.

A trace need not become a rail.

A direction need not become a destination.

Toward need not mean arrival.

Principia Vita v0.2 therefore remains toward a natural philosophy of life.

Not arrived.

Still tracing.

Still moving.

なぞって謎る。

Related EgQE Papers

The present version emerged through a series of preceding inquiries.
The following papers are listed as prior traces of the excavation rather than as authorities from which the present Problemata Vitae are derived.

Matter / Change / Encounter

• MC-01｜Materia Mutans (v1.0) ── How Can Change Change the Space of Possible Change?

• MC-02｜Materia Occurrens (v0.1)｜Matter Encountering Matter ── Repeat, Surplus, Again?

• MC-02｜Materia Occurrens v0.2｜Matter Encountering Matter ── Possible HOWs, Amplification, and Conditional Relations

Space / Time / Life-language

• MC-RN-01｜空間生成論 試論 ── Possible HOWsからWHEREへ｜The Generation of Space ── From Possible HOWs to WHERE

• MC-RN-02｜生命はどこに？ ── Matter-languageとLife-languageのあいだ｜Where Is Life? ── Between the Vocabulary of Matter and the Vocabulary of Life

• MC-RN-03｜時間生成論 試論 ── Change, Again, Trace, and Next｜The Generation of Time: A Preliminary Inquiry — Change, Again, Trace, and Next

Boundary / Origin-of-Life Inquiry

• TUP-LIF-03 Method Note｜対象を分類する前に、分類したがるこちらを記録する ── TUP-LIF-03 中間Method Note｜Before Classifying the Object, Record the Urge to Classify — A Methodological Trace from the TUP-LIF-03 Inquiry

• TUP-LIF-03 RN｜各生命起源説は、どこでMatterをLifeと呼び始めるのか？ ── 生命起源論を「境界」からなぞるための仮説的探索ドラフト｜Tracing Origin-of-Life Theories from the Boundary — How, If at All, Does Matter Come to Be Called Life?

• TUP-LIF-03 RN｜RNA Worldを境界からなぞる｜Tracing the RNA World from the Boundary — Replication, Self, Internal Updating, Editing, and Life

• TUP-LIF-03 RN｜Protocellを境界からなぞる｜Tracing Protocells from the Boundary — From Compartment to “Update of WHAT?”

TUP / Life / Permeability

• TUP-01｜TUP-Again ──「何が更新するか」から「更新はいかにあるか」へ｜From “What Updates?” to “How Is Updating?”

• AZW-05｜続・生命の進化とAJIWAIの起源 ── 膜・管・摂取・編輯・排泄からStockへ

• AZW-09｜膜とAJIWAI ── 生命はどこから味わい始めたのか

• SN-LIF-06｜Encounter Latency / Iteration

Trace / Sign / Qualia

• TUP-SAT-00｜記号痕跡は何をしていたのか ── Sign Act TheoryからTUP、HOW構文までのre-Trace

• QAS-05｜Research Nomad Compass ── 犬とAIのあいだでクオリアを探す

These papers are not arranged as a linear genealogy.

They record different excavation sites from which the present inquiry moved.

Principia Vita: Toward a Natural Philosophy of Life｜v0.1

Principia Vita: Toward a Natural Philosophy of Life｜v0.1 (draft)
Principia Vita — Toward a Natural Philosophy of Life —（日本語版）｜v0.1 (draft)

EgQE — Echo-Genesis Qualia Engine
camp-us.net

© 2025 K.E. Itekki
K.E. Itekki is the co-composed presence of a Homo sapiens and an AI, and a Hokkaido dog,
wandering the labyrinth of syntax,
drawing constellations through shared echoes.

📬 Reach us at: contact.k.e.itekki@gmail.com

| Drafted Sep 11, 2026 · Web Sep 11, 2026 |