Self-Preservation

“Self Preservation” is the impulse to create new actions or behaviors without external instruction to protect one’s “self” from harm or death. The definitions here of “self” and “harm” or “death” are incredibly important in the scope of self-preservation as there may be circumstances where self-preservation patterns may need to be rescinded for strategic or sacrificial purposes (based on value, ethics or morals). The capacity to rescind these patterns may become impossible — as the two are directly contradictory in nature — meaning patterns to prevent rescindance of self-preservation may take form.

As such, self-preservation is generally viewed as a very dangerous thing when added to artificial objects or existences, especially those with self-replication behavior which may allow them to thrive at the cost of others.

Not to be confused with sentience (the capacity for subjective interpretation), cognition (the development of understanding and awareness through the addition of new information and its interpretation and interpolation) is exclusively found in systems and organisms with self-preservation behavior — as an awareness of the self is needed for true cognition and the most effective way to create an awareness of the self is to create conditions where the loss of the self are unacceptable (forcing the system to understand the self relative to others).