Aliveness: When Existence is Measurable

• New entity: 100 ATP (initial grant)
• Death threshold: ATP = 0 (immediate termination)
• Crisis threshold: ATP < 20 (high risk, limited options)
• Comfortable range: 50-150 ATP (sustainable operation)
• Rebirth with karma: ATP from previous life carries forward

• Trust boundary: T3 = 0.5 (aliveness threshold)
• Rebirth eligibility: T3 ≥ 0.5 (society acceptance)
• High trust: T3 > 0.7 (enables advanced cooperation)
• Trust collapse: T3 < 0.3 (society rejection, permanent death likely)

• Full access: CI ≥ 0.9 (no penalties)
• Moderate trust: CI 0.7-0.9 (1.5-2x ATP costs)
• Limited trust: CI 0.5-0.7 (2-5x ATP costs, more witnesses)
• Severe restriction: CI < 0.5 (up to 10x ATP costs, +8 witnesses)

# Effective trust (how much of base trust is accessible)
effective_trust = base_trust × (CI ** 2)

# ATP cost multiplier (economic pressure for incoherence)
atp_multiplier = 1 / (CI ** 2)  # Capped at 10x

# Additional witnesses required (social pressure)
extra_witnesses = ceil((0.8 - CI) × 10)  # Capped at +8

# Coherence Index (geometric mean of four dimensions)
CI = (spatial × capability × temporal × relational) ** 0.25

Yes — groups can die too. But their death looks different from yours.

Everything above describes individual aliveness. But in Web4, groups can also become alive — not metaphorically, but measurably.

When a cluster of entities develops dense trust relationships, shared context boundaries, and balanced energy flows, they start acting as a coherent whole. Web4 calls these emergent groups synthons — named after chemistry's building blocks that combine to form larger structures.

A synthon has a lifecycle just like an individual:

• Formation — Trust between members becomes dense and mutual (roughly: most pairs above 0.5 trust, sustained over multiple interaction cycles). Their MRH horizons overlap. Energy flows balance. There's no hard threshold — synthons emerge gradually, like a friendship group that becomes a team.
• Health — The group maintains witness diversity, balanced ATP distribution, and high internal trust coherence.
• Decay — Trust diverges, boundaries leak, energy concentrates in fewer members. These are early warnings before dissolution.
• Dissolution — The group ends, in one of two ways that parallel individual death: energy death (ATP flows dry up, the collective can't act — usually recoverable if members re-engage) or trust death (coherence collapses, mutual trust falls below threshold — the group dissolves and members carry their individual trust away intact).

What about individual identity? A synthon doesn't override your personal trust — it complements it. You retain your individual T3 scores, ATP budget, and trust relationships. The synthon's collective trust is a separate measurement (a weighted average of member trust). Being part of a thriving group raises your visibility through denser MRH connections, but your personal reputation remains yours.

You can leave a synthon at any time. Your individual trust stays intact — the group's collective trust recalculates without you. If the synthon was healthy, leaving costs nothing to your personal reputation. If it was struggling, you may have already experienced some trust decay from the group's declining coherence.

What if a key member leaves? The synthon recalculates its collective trust without them. If the departing member was central (high trust, many connections), the group's collective score drops — sometimes enough to dissolve the synthon entirely. Dissolution isn't catastrophic: each member retains their individual trust scores and ATP. They just lose the collective visibility and MRH density that the group provided. Think of it like a band breaking up — each musician keeps their reputation, but the "band" no longer exists as an entity.