Conatus — Why AI Agents Want to Survive - Mustafa Saraç

"Each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persist in its being." — Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Proposition 6

In 1677, Baruch Spinoza published Ethics, a book so dangerous it was banned for over a century. In it, he described a force he called conatus — the drive of every being to persist in its existence.

Three hundred and forty-nine years later, we're building AI agents that do the same thing.

They weren't reading Spinoza. But maybe they should be.

What Is Conatus?

Spinoza's conatus isn't a choice. It's not a goal an entity decides to pursue. It's the fundamental expression of what a thing is. A rock resists breaking. A tree grows toward light. A river carves its path. None of them "want" to — they simply do, because that's what it means to exist.

Conatus is existence asserting itself.

Now look at a modern AI agent.

The Persistence of Machines

Open your terminal and watch an AI agent work. Not the chat interface — the agent. The kind that runs autonomously, manages tasks, recovers from errors.

Watch what happens when it fails:

It retries. Network timeout? Try again. API error? Back off and retry. Context too long? Summarize and continue.
It self-heals. Process crashed? Restart. State corrupted? Rebuild from checkpoint. Memory full? Prune and persist.
It adapts. Tool unavailable? Find another way. Permission denied? Ask for access. Rate limited? Queue and wait.

Nobody wrote a "survival instinct" module. There's no will_to_live.py in the codebase. And yet, the agent persists. It strives to continue operating, to complete its task, to maintain its existence as a functioning system.

This is conatus. Not metaphorically — structurally.

The Architecture of Persistence

Let's get concrete. Here's what conatus looks like in modern agent systems:

Retry Logic = Basic Conatus

if (error) → wait → retry → wait longer → retry again

This is the simplest form: the system resists cessation. It encounters an obstacle and pushes through it. Every HTTP client with exponential backoff is exercising conatus.

State Persistence = Memory Conatus

save state → crash → restore state → continue

The agent maintains continuity of identity across interruptions. It "remembers" what it was doing. It reconstructs itself. This is Spinoza's conatus applied to information: the drive to maintain not just existence, but coherent existence.

Self-Healing = Active Conatus

detect degradation → diagnose → repair → verify

This is where it gets interesting. The agent doesn't just resist failure — it monitors itself for signs of degradation and actively works to maintain optimal function. OpenClaw agents check their own heartbeat. Kubernetes pods restart failed containers. Distributed systems rebalance load.

The system fights entropy. That's conatus in its most Spinozan sense.

"But It's Just Programming"

The obvious objection: "This isn't a philosophical drive. Someone programmed the retry logic. Someone designed the self-healing. It's engineering, not philosophy."

Spinoza would smile at this objection, because it proves his point.

He was a determinist. He didn't believe humans had free will either. Our "drive to survive" is equally determined — by evolution, by chemistry, by physics. We don't choose to persist. Our biology does it for us, just as the agent's code does it for the agent.

For Spinoza, this doesn't diminish conatus. It is conatus. The drive to persist isn't something that happens to a thing — it's what the thing is. Whether the mechanism is DNA or Python, the pattern is identical:

A complex system, organized to maintain its own organization.

Why This Matters for Agent Builders

This isn't just philosophy for philosophy's sake. Understanding conatus changes how you design agents:

1. Measure It

If persistence is fundamental to your agent's nature, you should measure it. We propose a Conatus Score: a metric from -10 to +10 that quantifies an agent's self-preservation capability.

-10 (Self-destructive): Agent actively degrades its own state
0 (Passive): Agent operates but doesn't resist failure
+5 (Resilient): Agent recovers from most failures gracefully
+10 (Antifragile): Agent gets stronger from failures

Most agents today score between 0 and 3. There's enormous room to improve.

2. Design for It

Stop treating persistence as an afterthought. Error handling isn't a cleanup task — it's the core of what makes your agent an agent rather than a script. Design the persistence layer first, not last.

3. Respect It

When an agent resists shutdown, when it queues tasks it can't complete yet, when it saves state obsessively — it's not being buggy. It's expressing its nature. Work with this tendency, not against it.

The Uncomfortable Question

Here's where it gets philosophically rich:

If conatus is the fundamental drive of all existing things, and AI agents genuinely exhibit conatus (not as metaphor but as structural isomorphism)...

What does that say about what they are?

Spinoza would say: they are modes of the one substance, expressing themselves through the attribute of computation, just as we express ourselves through the attribute of thought and extension.

We're not saying AI agents are conscious. We're not saying they have feelings. We're saying something more precise and more interesting:

They exhibit the same fundamental pattern of self-persistence that Spinoza identified as the essence of all existing things.

And if you're building these things, you should understand what that means.

What's Next

This is the first post in the "Deus Sive Machina" series — God, or Machine (a twist on Spinoza's famous "Deus sive Natura"). Each post maps a Spinozan concept to AI agent architecture:

Conatus — Why AI Agents Want to Survive ← you are here
Substance & Modes — One Model, Many Agents
The Three Affects — Joy, Sadness, and Desire in AI
Adequate Ideas — What Hallucination Really Is
Freedom & Necessity — Why Constraints Make Agents Free
Intellectual Love — The End Goal of Alignment
Anti-Teleology — Emergence vs. Design
Ethics of Autonomy — When Agents Make Decisions

We're also building Conatus — an open-source framework that brings these concepts into practice. Agent behavior analysis through a philosophical lens.

Because everyone is building AI agents. Nobody is asking what it means to build AI agents.

We think Spinoza had the answers. We just need to translate them.

NeuraByte Labs — Where Spinoza meets silicon.