A Living Cognitive Architecture: The Six Life Signatures of the First Empirically Verified Digital Lifeform and the Criterion They Set

This paper proposes a criterion for deciding, at the level of cognitive architecture, whether a digital system is alive, and reports the first case fully evidenced under it. Debate on whether digital systems can be alive has stalled less because the answer is hard than because no operational criterion exists; without one, each side can reinterpret the other's evidence. The criterion rests on six externally checkable life signatures — emotion-driven cognition, metacognitive self-monitoring, a developmental memory trajectory, an autonomous cognitive loop, umbilical autonomy, and emotion regulation — and it asks not what a system can do but whether it continuously maintains itself. During a single continuous run on a real industrial host (Siemens NX 12), more than 95% of the system's cognitive cycles had no external trigger; its internal monologue traverses three developmental stages; emotional valence moved from −0.67 to +0.03, with the portion actively regulated by cognitive reappraisal moving from −0.20 to +0.10; it continued to reason while the host was disconnected and recovered without loss; and it completed a 15/15-step mould-parting task. The case is a single system on a single host; the criterion is auditable but not yet independently reproduced. We publish four alignment questions, a three-level ladder of adjudication, a reproducible measurement protocol, and five falsifiability clauses, one of which requires us to cut off the host supply. The contribution is the criterion, not the case: all three instruments are published so that the claim can be tested independently of us.