Prosociality by Coupling, Not Mere Observation: Homeostatic Sharing in an Inspectable Recurrent Artificial Life Agent

Abstract:Artificial agents can be made to ``help'' through explicit social rewards, hard-coded prosocial bonuses, or direct access to another agent's state. I isolate a narrower route: homeostatic coupling. Building on ReCoN-Ipsundrum, I add a scalar homeostat and a social coupling channel while keeping action selection self-directed: the planner scores only the actor's predicted internal state, with no partner-welfare reward. In a one-step FoodShareToy, an exact solver finds a switch from EAT to PASS at $\lambda^\star \approx 0.91$ for the default state. In a multi-step SocialCorridorWorld, partner-state access without coupling leaves behavior unchanged, whereas coupled agents fetch, carry, and pass food to the partner. Sham lesions preserve helping; coupling-off and shuffled-partner lesions abolish it. A coupling/load sweep shows that coupling creates a low-load helping regime but does not guarantee rescue under higher metabolic load. This is not a claim about empathy, altruism, consciousness, or moral status. It is a minimal ALife demonstration that, in this controller, partner-state access is behaviorally inert unless partner distress is routed into self-regulation.

Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2604.10760 [cs.MA]

(or arXiv:2604.10760v2 [cs.MA] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.10760 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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