Living and life-like systems vary in viability. They are alive or dead, healthy or unhealthy, getting better or worse, or dying. Despite the ease of applying these descriptions informally, there do not yet exist general methods for richly quantifying viability or health in such systems —even when every aspect of the system is available for experimental variation and measurement. Nevertheless, for a given system of interest, it is sometimes possible to distinguish between states where the system will persist for the foreseeable future (there are termed viable states) and those where it will not. This is perhaps the most basic, binary classification of states in terms of viability and it can be used to identify different regions in ‘viability space’ (see Figure 1 and Barandiaran and Egbert, 2013). An improved measure would make it possible to not just categorize systems but to compare the relative viability of two states that are in the same category, i. e. that are both expected to persist or both expected to die. This type of measure would make it possible to identify whether a system is becoming more or less viable, or to evaluate the influence of a given external perturbation upon viability, thereby enhancing our ability to understand and influence the viability of complex life-like systems.
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