Cognitive Life Science: Preliminary Experimental Validation of the Operational Closure Framework

This paper proposes "Cognitive Life Science" as a new interdisciplinary framework addressing the question "what is life." We argue that life is not a state but a continuous process whose boundary and internal order are produced and maintained by its own operations (operational closure). Through a Cell-type virtual machine (exomind-cell), we formalize this framework and conduct systematic experiments with 100-round independent replication protocols. Key findings include: (1) operational closure alone produces behavioral differentiation with 75% replication rate under optimized parameters; (2) the addition of a cognitive mechanism (GATE instruction) raises the replication rate to 82% with doubled effect size (Cohen's d: 0.59→1.12); (3) both mechanisms require adequate metabolic surplus—under resource-scarce conditions, neither produces reliable effects (42%≈44%). These results support the thesis that cognition is not an add-on to life but the key mechanism that transforms physical constraints from fragile tendencies into robust adaptations. All code and data are open-source.