Filtering Accounting: The General Principle Underlying Life and Agency

This paper formalizes the Filtering Accounting Law (FAL): a system persists if and only if filtering effectiveness in its favor exceeds energetic cost, independent of where filtering is executed or how the cost is paid. By explicitly separating filtering execution, energetic payment, and beneficiary identity, FAL resolves longstanding ambiguities surrounding viruses, parasites, cancer, and externalized human filtering. The framework demonstrates that: - Viruses qualify as alive because filtering serves viral continuation, despite execution occurring within host cells- Cancer cell lineages constitute autonomous living systems filtering for their own continuation- Mitochondria remain alive but operate within constrained autonomy under host-dominated accounting- Tools and AI are not alive because their filtering serves human continuation, not their own Life, as defined in Filtering Using Chemistry for Self-Continuation (FUCSC), emerges as a bounded case—filtering for self-continuation realized through chemistry—of this general substrate-independent principle. The framework yields falsifiable predictions across virology, cancer biology, endosymbiosis, parasitology, and technologically mediated filtering. It establishes that persistence is fundamentally an accounting property, not an architectural one. This work completes the Filtering Framework trilogy: 1. FUCSC (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17759342) - defines life as filtering using chemistry for self-continuation2. FPT (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18129155) - quantifies filtering power as FP = C×F×R×S/E3. FAL (this paper) - generalizes the accounting principle underlying all persistent systems