Persistence as a Primordial Creative Impulse: A Metaphysical Interpretation of the Free Energy Principle and Its Implications for Natural and Artificial Systems

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) offers a unifying mathematical framework for understanding how systems maintain their organization by minimizing variational free energy. While typically applied to biological and cognitive systems, the FEP applies to any entity that persists as a non equilibrium steady state. This paper argues that such universality reveals a deeper metaphysical structure: persistence itself is a primordial creative impulse of the universe, and the FEP is the formal expression of this impulse across physical, biological, and cognitive scales. We develop this thesis by showing how persistence manifests in atomic stability, dissipative structures, chemical networks, organisms, and minds, and by demonstrating that the FEP does not support a principled boundary between life and non life. On this basis, we propose a metaphysics in which matter, life, and mind form a continuous spectrum of self organizing processes unified by their participation in the same persistence driven dynamics. We then extend this framework to artificial systems, arguing that artificial general intelligence, artificial consciousness, and artificial life, if achieved, should be understood as engineered expressions of the same universal impulse toward persistence expressed via self maintenance and inference. This perspective reframes AGI alignment, artificial agency, and the ontology of artificial systems, positioning them not as technological anomalies but as potential further elaborations of the universe’s intrinsic tendency toward organized persistence. The result is a unified metaphysical account that situates natural and artificial cognition within a single, scale free ontology of self organizing systems.