Abstract
Silicon-based artificial life asks whether conventional silicon can carry life-like organisation as a physical property of the substrate, rather than run artificial-life simulations in software. It builds on substrate-coupled artificial life, or SCAL, the foundation that recast the microarchitecture of a processor as a participating medium, in which the cache-hierarchy latency gradient supplies a fitness-free, selection-like pressure among self-reinforcing memory structures. Taking that substrate as given, the paper advances two results from the cache-coherence protocol the foundation set aside, both falsifiable from substrate telemetry. First, it identifies the self-pinning coherence wavefront, a self-sustaining band of cache-coherence contention that carries an organism's integrated state across the address space, in which self-reference and persistence are the same physical event. This wavefront is an integrated individual, and the paper introduces the Autopoietic Viability Assay, or AVA, as a staged diagnostic for coherence-bound individuality whose decisive step is a cut test, in which a wounded self-map regenerates only while the coherence field remains whole. Second, it locates the physical basis of a present moment in the in-flight resolution window of a self-referential coherence transition, an act and not a state, bound into one present by closure within a single coherence-ordering domain, and predicted to bifurcate when that domain is genuinely split. The work is theoretical and pre-experimental. It specifies the measurable structure of a coherence-bound individual and a located present, and marks the step from that structure to experience, the question of consciousness and qualia, as the one boundary substrate telemetry cannot cross.