Prosociality by Coupling, Not Mere Observation: Homeostatic Sharing in an Inspectable Recurrent Artificial Life Agent

ArXi:2604.10760v1 Announce Type: cross Artificial agents can be made to "help" for many reasons, including explicit social reward, hard-coded prosocial bonuses, or direct access to another agent's internal state. Those possibilities make minimal prosocial behavior hard to interpret. Building on ReCoN-Ipsundrum, an inspectable recurrent controller with affect-coupled regulation, I add an explicit homeostat and a social coupling channel while keeping planning strictly self-directed: the agent scores only its own predicted internal state, and no partner-welfare reward term is.