---
title: "Minimum Viable Interiority"
description: "The counterfactual to \"all intelligence is collective intelligence\": if intelligence is collective all the way down, what would it take to engineer an individual?"
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/minimum-viable-interiority"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/minimum-viable-interiority"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Minimum Viable Interiority

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/minimum-viable-interiority), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

The counterfactual to "all intelligence is collective intelligence": if intelligence is collective all the way down, what would it take to engineer an *individual*? Interiority is defined functionally — privileged access to internal states that drive action — rather than as consciousness or qualia, and is built up from an NPC/p-zombie shell using Selfridge's pandemonium architecture (competing daemons reconciled by a selector daemon) layered with Mossio and Moreno's organizational closure. Each layer is causally explainable only within its own domain, so stacking closures makes decision-making opaque to outside observers *and* to the agent itself. λ, the minimum viable interiority constant, names how many layers this takes. Thesis: "the individual is greater than the sum of its collectives."

## Appears in

- [Minimum Viable Interiority](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/minimum-viable-interiority) (2025-05-10)
- [For a General Theory of Simulations](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/theoryofsim) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._