Particle Life
Asymmetric forces between particle types
Schmickl et al. (2016) · Mogas-Recalde (2020)
Each particle has a type. Each type pair has a force coefficient in the 4×4 matrix on the left — negative is repulsion, positive is attraction, and the matrix is allowed to be asymmetric. That asymmetry is everything. Newton's third law is absent by design; what emerges is chased, chased, and chased.
| -0.7 | -0.9 | +0.5 | +0.1 | |
| +0.8 | +0.7 | -0.9 | -0.9 | |
| -0.8 | +0.1 | -0.9 | -0.9 | |
| +0.3 | -0.3 | -0.4 | +0.4 |
In Newtonian physics, every force comes in a pair: if A attracts B, B attracts A with equal magnitude. Momentum is conserved. Closed systems do not spontaneously accelerate.
The matrix here is not required to be symmetric. M[A][B] = +0.5 and M[B][A] = -0.5 is allowed — A is drawn toward B while B flees from A. What this produces is not unphysical noise. It is predation, formally identical to a food chain. No species-level cognition, no goals, no representations — just sixteen numbers and a quadratic-time force kernel. And yet what emerges reads unambiguously as ecology.
That disjunction — between what the system is at the code level and what it looks like at the screen level — is the same gap that appears when we look at a brain and call it a mind. The question of when pattern becomes agent is not a question about adding ingredients. It is a question about how far emergence goes before the vocabulary has to change.