2026 – Now
Deep environment rhythm (real-time tide) gates the strength of selfhood emerged out of a being, determining the degree of self-organizing behavior; human interaction perturbs the being, without commanding it; the system’s resilience to perturbation and unpredictable behavior during its recovery path are contingent on both tidal phenomenon and its memory. First implemented in Tidal Spine.
深环境节奏（实时潮汐）门控这个虚拟生物的自我 (selfhood) 程度—决定它体内的自组织能凝聚到什么程度；人只能扰动，不能命令；而系统对扰动的抵抗与恢复过程中的不可预知行为，取决于潮汐现象与系统自身的记忆。
Most ALife / kinetic / synthetic creature works predetermines that “an agent is an agent”, where individuality is given, binary (it either is or it isn’t), with a set of semantic features. Since March 2026 during my residency work on Tidal Spine, I investigated into self-organizing behavior in a decentralized body with individuality / selfhood as a continuous, externally conditioned variable. At high tide, a multi-oscillator system aggregates into one coherently moving body (ego emergence); at low tide, the system unravels into a group of its parts each moving at its own intrinsic rhythm (ego dissolution). A body is continuously sliding from “a unity” and “a collective of organisms.” It connects into a serious theoretical question keeps researchers up at night across domains of ALife, theoretical biology, consciousness, and philosophy have been long investigating: where is the boundary of selfhood? Is an “ego” intrinsic or emergent and reversible?
In such framing that the deep planetary rhythm that determines the strength of its selfhood happens on a longer timescale, the role of human interaction is treated by this system as a part of its environment perturbation on a shorter timescale. At high tide, it has a strong ego, becomes more robust to human perturbation, raises threshold for effective disturbance events, and recovers faster from distubances; at low tide, its ego weakens, and it collapses in the event of a slight disturbance. The body works on a deterministic model of adaptive neighbor-coupled oscillators, but due to varying ego strength, recovery residue and memory from prior disturbances, its recovery behavior from human perturbation is not mathematically predictable.
From input→output to perturbation→depends on how much of a self it currently is
I designed as a reversible, environmentally gated arc: multitude → individual → multitude（众生→个体→众生 where 众生 means all living beings, or all sentient beings）
