Foundations of Reason: A Process Model of Life, the Compass, Self-Correction, and Artificial General Intelligence

Description — English

Foundations of Reason 5.0 presents a unified process model of life, reason, self-correction, and artificial general intelligence.

The central result of the work is the Compass Phrase:

“Life strives toward Reason because only Reason is capable of consciously preserving, stabilizing, and continuing Life.”

The Compass is proposed as a process-based answer to the question of the meaning of life and as a navigational foundation for evaluating goals, motives, decisions, and consequences. Its operational extension requires that decisions preserve the continuation of life, maintain correspondence with reality, and avoid destroying the diversity of viable future paths.

Life is defined not as a special substance or static object, but as an autonomous reproducible process arising from the organization of nonliving physical components and preserving causal continuity across changing states and carriers. Reason is described as the navigational structure of life: a mode of organization capable of modelling the environment and itself, revising its goals, assumptions, methods, and trajectory, and preserving the possibility of further correction.

The work reconstructs the emergence of reason as a causal sequence:

life → meaning → Compass → observation → feedback → memory → anticipatory self-preservation → will → consciousness → awareness → reflection → independent dialogue → reason → ethics → science → AGI → civilizational self-correction.

Reason is therefore defined not as intelligence, computational power, or a collection of isolated abilities, but as the causal closure of self-correcting mechanisms. An observed discrepancy must be capable of changing the model, the method, and subsequent action, while the resulting correction is preserved and transferred to future situations.

Version 5.0 introduces and clarifies:

• the Compass Phrase and its operational application;
• process definitions of life and reason;
• the distinction between intelligence and reason;
• the separation of consciousness, awareness, reflection, dialogue, and the control loop of thinking;
• the principle of cumulative precision;
• structural criteria distinguishing AI from AGI;
• the AGI Incubator as an isolated environment for experimentally searching configurations of reason itself;
• implications for ethics, science, law, governance, and coordinated autonomy;
• falsification criteria and a program of discriminating experiments.

Appendix A contains the methodological status of the claims, operational definitions, limits of applicability, falsification conditions, and experimental directions. The work is presented as a philosophical and methodological foundation and as a research program for subsequent mathematical formalization, engineering implementation, and empirical testing.

This Zenodo record contains the complete Russian and English editions of version 5.0.

Mihails Tkalics
ORCID: 0009-0006-9543-6414
Contact & discussion:
Email: generalmek@inbox.lv

© 2026 Mihails Tkalics. All rights reserved.

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