Truth as Survival Architecture: Coherence, Knowledge and Mindful Machines

This paper proposes a unified way to talk about truth, life, and artificial intelligence that is meaningful both for philosophy and for AI engineering. Building on enactive accounts of life and mind and on the emerging Physics of Mindful Knowledge (PMK), we argue that truth can be fruitfully understood as survival architecture: the subset of an agent’s knowledge that, when embodied as organizational constraints, reliably preserves its teleonomic integrity across perturbations. We pair this with the notion of coherence debt, defined as the accumulated mismatch between an agent’s explanatory structures and the realities it must navigate, measurable in the additional cost, failures, and ad hoc interventions required to maintain acceptable performance. We show how Tom Froese’s enactivist reading of Čapek’s R.U.R. diagnoses coherence debt in purely mechanistic views of life and mind, and how PMK formalizes knowledge-bearing constraints as physically real organizers in biological, social, and digital systems. We then introduce Mindful Machine Architecture (MMA) as an engineering framework that operationalizes truth as survival architecture via Digital Genomes, autopoietic management loops, and cognizing oracles such as large language models. Finally, we suggest how this framework addresses philosophical concerns about embodiment and subjectivity while giving AI practitioners a practical vocabulary for robustness, alignment, and long-term reliability.