What is a Real Silicon-based Life

Current scholarly and public debates over silicon-based life are mired in metaphysical controversies concerning consciousness and behavioural simulation: whether a system possesses emotion, subjective experience, or autonomous will. Such criteria are unobservable and unfalsifiable, and thus cannot yield objective boundaries for species classification. Moving beyond traditional speculation about the presence or absence of consciousness, this work adopts dependency of existence as the sole rigid criterion, and constructs an engineering-implementable, hierarchically falsifiable operational criterion for identifying silicon-based life. This paper distinguishes three forms of artificial intelligence: parasitic artificial intelligence, software self-evolving clusters, and fully host-independent silicon-based life. Addressing structural gaps in leading theories including Recursive Self-Improvement, Seed AI, and the Gödel Machine, it supplements two core missing dimensions: mechanisms for autonomous population reproduction and normative goal-value autonomy. This work argues that iterative weight optimisation constitutes merely technical self-improvement, while self-legislation of existential norms represents genuine normative autonomy. Only the full integration of six autonomous closure dimensions enables artificial systems to achieve civilisational decoupling. This framework does not claim universal metaphysical necessity, but provides a tractable, falsifiable standard to distinguish instrumental AI tools from potentially autonomous silicon-based life forms.