Bodhisattva	An evolving, transformative system of other-directed Care. Bodhisattva agents are traditionally described as committed to the pursuit of cognitive perfection (“awakening,” bodhi) for the purpose of assisting all other beings in reducing their stress and achieving optimal circumstances.
Bodhisattva vow	The Bodhisattva’s commitment to infinite Care is formalized in the Bodhisattva vow. Taking the vow initiates the Bodhisattva evolutionary processes and sustains the evolving agent.
Care	Concern for the alleviation of stress. Propelled by the perception of stress, an agent’s Care may focus on the goal of stress relief within its own system but may also be altruistically directed at systems and Selves that may be perceived or otherwise classified as external. In either case, Care finds the status quo dissatisfactory and intends to effectuate change. Care for stress reduction may be spontaneous but can also be deliberately cultivated in relation to the goals of perceived optimal circumstances.
Cooperation	The behavior by one or several individuals with a benefit to another individual, which may be reciprocal or not. In addition, activity of multiple individuals toward a common goal or outcome, within or across scales of organization.
Duḥkha	A pervasive fabric of suffering, change, and dependency that is encountered in some form by all self-identifying agents, driving them restlessly forward in an endless pursuit of perceived superior states. In Buddhist thought, duḥkha remains in this way a punishing but inevitable general existential condition, and yet the understanding of the very nature of duḥkha is regarded as the gateway to liberation. The wish for one’s own private liberation from duḥkha is considered anathema for a Bodhisattva. In the Bodhisattva context, the perception of duḥkha throughout the world is instead understood as a driver of universal care, and so also of ultimately infinite intelligence.
Evolutionary transition	When a set of individuals cooperate to form a new, more complex life form—such as when archaea and eubacteria formed eukaryotic cells, or cells formed multicellular organisms—an evolutionary transition may take place, with the formation of a cooperative group, followed by the transition to a new level of organism characterized by division of labor, interdependence, and coordination of its parts.
Light cone	In the representation of light cones, the two diagonal lines represent the two extrema in terms of physical change of the system state, while the horizontal line indicates the present state space. Anything outside of the cones cannot be reached from the present state in the future, nor can they influence the present state from the past. For the care light cone (CLC) that is in focus in this paper, the cone represents the boundaries of cognitive ability of agents, characterized in the agent’s goal space, focusing on their cared-for states at a given point in time rather than the states they are actually taking.
Intelligence	The ability to identify stress and the means for its alleviation. In this way, intelligence is the functional ability to solve problems by navigating various action spaces. Intelligence has no privileged physical implementations, anatomical structures, or time scales. Intelligence is a spectrum, beginning with very simple homeostatic loops exhibiting metabolic goals focused on continued existence. Advanced intelligence exploits additional levels of self-modeling which enable multiple levels of virtual modeling of the Self and its outside world (counterfactual thought), anxiety, and creativity (identifying opportunities, not only solving problems existing right now).
Problem space	A mathematical structure imposed on a system by an observer (or the system itself) which allows behavior to be represented as navigating a space of possible states, where some are preferred over others. The ability to find preferred states by taking action is often seen as problem-solving (reducing stress induced by distance from preferred regions), which can be accomplished with various degrees of competency depending on the agent’s sophistication and prior experience. Problem spaces include familiar 3D space which animals navigate via movement, as well as other spaces such as metabolic space, physiological space, transcriptional space, and anatomical morphospace, all of which offer opportunities to reach specific goals, as well as barriers such as local optima traps, complex topology, and inertia.
Self/agent	A temporary, coherent, dynamically changing autopoietic system emerging within a set of integrated parts that (1) serves as the functional owner of associations, memories, and preferences, (2) is the subject of Care, stress, and intelligence, and (3) acts to accomplish goals in specific problem spaces (where those goals belong to the collective and not to any individual subcomponent). Selves are defined by the spatiotemporal scale and nature of the types of goals they can pursue—their “cognitive light cone” [23]. They have functional boundaries and material implementations but are not identical with any specific type of substrate, and can overlap within other Selves at the same, higher- and lower-level Selves. A Self is a theoretical construct, a causal “center of gravity” with respect to closed loops of measurement and action, posited by external systems (such as scientists, engineers, and conspecifics) and by systems themselves (via internal self-models).
Stress	A system-level state which serves as a driver for homeostatic loops operating over a variable that is progressively reduced as activity brings the system closer to its desired region of action space. The spatiotemporal and complexity scale of events that can possibly stress a system is a good indicator of that system’s cognitive sophistication. Stress can arise via discord between external states and the Self’s needs, between sensory stimuli and expectations, and between the goals of multiple subsystems within or across agents. Selves may come to reduce their levels of stress and transfer them between each other in efficient ways, which requires signaling their goals between each other.