Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Individuation — what makes something one thing, and the same thing over time or across descriptions — individuation, numerical identity and diversity, individuality and persistence of things of any kind, biological individuality and organisational closure. Selves are self and persons are personhood (group: philosophy; ADR-015, ADR-024).
111 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-005 v3 | Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individuality | Bourrat (2024), DOI-10.1007/s13194-023-00566-1. Of Krakauer et al.’s (2020) three mutual-information “individuality” terms (A* = I(S_{t+1}; S_t), A = I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t), nC = I(S_{t+1}; E_t | S_t)), Bourrat argues that nC and A* are not individuality measures. He then proposes the interventional  = I(S_{t+1}; Ŝ_t) (Eq. 6) and two ETI criteria: C1, a normalised Â_{S2}/H(Ŝ2) ≥ Â_{S1}/H(Ŝ1)|θ₀, and C2, low Var(Â_{S2} | Ê2 = ê2k). None of these is computed on any system. The paper’s claim that  ≡ I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t) = A in Krakauer’s model is false in general. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-027); a clear conceptual argument that information-theoretic individuality should be interventional. It is unproven as a measure. Three things would settle it: a worked computation of Â, C1 and C2 on an explicit model (for example Black et al.’s ecological-scaffolding model); a corrected account of how  relates to the observational A; and a correct adjustment set for its own Fig. 3 example. |
| LIT-045 v5 | Structural Realism | Ladyman (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/. The entry presents structural realism (Worrall 1989) as the attempt to keep both the no-miracles argument and the lesson of theory change. What is retained, and what we are entitled to believe, is structure, understood by ontic structuralists as modal structure. It sorts the view into an epistemic form, which falls to the Newman/Demopoulos–Friedman triviality result when stated as a Ramsey sentence (§3.2), and an ontic form with seven distinguishable theses, from eliminativism about individuals to “objects are constructs” (§4). The ontic form is motivated by quantum non-individuality and entanglement, gauge symmetry and the hole argument. The entry closes with seven objections, each answered in the author’s own voice (§5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-038); the standard map of the structural-realism literature, written by the founder of OSR. Read §2 for the theory-change argument, §3.2 for the Newman problem and §4’s seven OSR theses. Treat §5’s rebuttals as the author’s position, not as the field’s settled view. |
| LIT-049 v2 | A coarse-graining account of individuality: how the emergence of individuals represents a summary of lower-level evolutionary processes | Bourrat (2023), DOI-10.1007/s10539-023-09917-x. Bourrat proposes that a partition of particles into collectives defines individuals when the “projected” prediction (coarse-grain at t1, then evolve the coarse-grained state) differs from the “truthful” one (evolve at the fine grain, then coarse-grain at t2) by δC = C_T − C_P < θ, across many traits (Eqs. 1–2). He argues that, because measurement and computation are finite, coarse-graining can be the only way to predict at all: in his example, 100 operations predict 10 entities for 10 timesteps or 2 collectives for 50. That indispensability is his whole case for the “quasi-ontological” status of collectives at Godfrey-Smith and Kerr’s fifth stage. Nothing is computed on any model. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-064); a lucid philosophical statement of “individual = a coarse-graining worth its cost”. Its formal criterion is informal and, as written, degenerate: minimal δC picks the finest partition, and the cost term the argument depends on is never put into the criterion. It would be settled by a worked ETI model in which an explicit accuracy–cost objective is computed and picks out the collectives. |
| LIT-097 v4 | The Extended Mind | Clark & Chalmers (1998), DOI-10.1093/analys/58.1.7. The paper argues from a functionalist parity claim that a process or standing state which would count as cognitive if it happened in the head counts as cognitive when an external resource carries it, provided the resource is actively coupled to the organism here and now. Otto’s notebook entry is its example of such a standing belief. From this it infers, in one paragraph, that the self extends too. The four “criteria” for a coupled resource (constancy, direct availability, automatic endorsement, and the admittedly “arguable” past conscious endorsement) are offered as the features that make the paradigm case clear. The paper explicitly says they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-180); it is worth reading as the source text of the extended-mind thesis, and it is short. Its constitutive conclusion follows from a role-functionalism about belief and a parity principle that the paper states rather than defends, so a reader should take it as the origin of the debate and not as its settlement. |
| LIT-107 v3 | Quasi-set theory: a formal approach to a quantum ontology of properties | Holik et al. (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-022-03884-8. The paper argues, with no new theorem, that the Lombardi–da Costa ontology of properties for quantum mechanics can be stated in Krause’s quasi-set theory Q. On that ontology a system is a bundle of I-type-properties (instances of universal type-properties, represented by the algebra of observables) with no principle of individuality. For each property instance, the indiscernible instances form a qset U([Π]). An atomic bundle is any qset x with qc(x ∩ U) = 1 for each U; the Axiom of Choice in Q guarantees one exists. The bundle’s kind is Q(B) = {x ∈ P(Q) | R(x)}, whose members are all indiscernible. N particles are a subqset N(B) ⊂ Q(B) with qc = N, a definite number with no labels (§6, pp. 19–22). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-127); worth reading as a short, clear bridge between the modal-Hamiltonian “ontology of properties” (Lombardi et al.) and quasi-set theory (French & Krause 2006). The new formal content is about two pages (§6). Most of §5 restates Q’s axioms, and the printed proofs contain errors. It is a useful statement of the position, not a result. |
| LIT-111 v4 | AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | Birch (2025), DOI-10.31234/osf.io/af7c9_v1. Birch argues that two challenges must be met together: users misattributing human-like consciousness to chatbots (Challenge One), and possible “profoundly alien” AI consciousness that current science cannot settle (Challenge Two). For Challenge One he offers a personal-identity argument that the chatbot “friend” is typically a character with no persisting bearer (the “persisting interlocutor illusion”, §4) and three nudges that are neither “brainwashing” nor “lobotomizing” (§7). For Challenge Two he argues that behavioural markers are “gamed” (§10), that architectural markers are “Janus-faced” (§11), and that the resulting “two-level deadlock” between computational functionalism and biological naturalism can be broken over the long run by comparative animal studies (§12, Fig. 4). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-183); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “centrist” position, and it coins four concepts the AI-consciousness literature now uses (persisting interlocutor illusion, gaming problem, Janus problem, two-level deadlock). It is a manifesto: its design nudges are untested proposals, and its way out of the deadlock is a research programme that has “barely begun” (§12). |
| LIT-113 v3 | Duality and ontology | Le Bihan & Read (2018), DOI-10.1111/phc3.12555. A survey that sorts realist responses to dualities along two axes. The first is which of the naively interpreted dual worlds count as candidates for actuality: all of them (underdetermination), one (discrimination) or none (nihilism), each with or without the common-core world. That gives options (1)–(6), with the common-core approach being (1), (3) and (5). The second axis is what replaces the common core: an overarching theory, or “pluralism”, on which all dual structures are co-instantiated as parts of one world. Its verdicts are conditional: no option breaks the underdetermination without a further metaphysical principle, such as the PII, for which the authors see no independent support. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-152); worth reading as the shortest clear map of the realist options for interpreting dualities. It is a nontechnical survey, not an argument for any option. Its original contributions (the discrimination/common-core overlap, a defence of discrimination for AdS/CFT, and pluralism) are presented as options, not established. |
| LIT-115 v5 | Duality as a category-theoretic concept | Corfield (2015), DOI-10.1016/j.shpsb.2015.07.004. A short programmatic paper. Its thesis is that category theory, not set theory, is the framework in which the scattered instances of mathematical duality can be drawn together. The constructions in §3 (dual adjunctions restricting to dual equivalences on fixed points, truth-value-enriched Galois connections, Isbell conjugation, dualising objects “keeping summer and winter homes”) all “revolve around” adjunction, though Corfield expects no “single monolithic account” (p. 59–60). On his usage, ‘duality’ is reserved for “involution with some form of structural reversal” (p. 57), so several physicists’ dualities (homological mirror symmetry as an A∞-equivalence, mirror symmetry’s Z2 on the Hodge diamond, S-duality as a vestige of SL(2,Z)) are better called equivalences or symmetries. He proposes, without argument beyond the examples, that philosophers of physics will need homotopy type theory rather than predicate logic for the sameness questions dualities raise. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-141); worth reading, briefly, as the mathematician-philosopher’s counterweight to the physics-first accounts of duality this record holds: it is the clearest statement that what physicists call a duality is often what a mathematician calls an equivalence, and it is only seven pages. Its positive programme (HoTT for philosophy of physics) is announced, not carried out. |
| LIT-116 v3 | The Desperate Search for Meaning in Life | Browning & Veit (2022), https://philarchive.org/archive/BROWAW-9. A popular-philosophy chapter that reads Evangelion’s characters as seeking meaning first in piloting (duty, recognition), then in connection with others, frustrated by Schopenhauer’s porcupine (hedgehog) dilemma. It argues that the failure of Instrumentality shows that a self, and so meaning, exists only through contrast with and separation from others: “without it [otherness], the self cannot exist” (p. 9). Meaning comes from human connection “but maintaining some distance” (p. 10). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-119); worth reading only as a short, accessible illustration of the relational view of the self (self constituted by the self–other boundary) applied to meaning in life. It offers no original argument, cites nothing beyond two quoted sources, and misdescribes Heidegger’s “Dasein”. |
| LIT-130 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics | Dufner (2025), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/. A survey, arguing no thesis of its own, of how three contested questions bear on ethics: which account of persistence is true (unique psychological continuity, Shoemaker and Parfit; or biological continuity and animalism, Olson and DeGrazia), whether identity or the psychological relations (continuity and/or connectedness) is what matters (Parfit’s fission case), and whether metaphysics constrains ethics or the reverse. It traces these through prudential concern, responsibility, abortion (Marquis), death and brain-death criteria, dementia and advance directives (Dworkin vs Jaworska on Margo), and the separateness of persons (Rawls, Parfit, Nozick, Taurek, Sidgwick, Brink). Its main recurring finding is that the relation that fixes persistence and the relation that matters ethically keep coming apart. It concludes that all three questions remain open. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-166); worth reading as the current, compact reference map from theories of persistence to applied ethics; it is a survey that takes no side, so it is a route to the primary sources (Parfit 1984, Olson 1997, McMahan 2002, Schechtman 1996, Korsgaard 1989) rather than a source of claims. |
| LIT-136 v2 | The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | Floridi (2011), DOI-10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6. Floridi deflates the diachronic question of personal identity, holding that sameness is always relative to a purpose-fixed level of abstraction and that metaphysical versions of the question “do not deserve to be taken seriously” (p. 554). He puts the synchronic question first: what binds a self’s information into a unity. His answer is an admittedly “figurative” 3C model in which the self is the last of three successive encapsulations, corporeal (bonded by chemical bonds), cognitive (bonded by mutual information) and conscious (bonded by semantics, and so dependent on a community). He then reads ICTs as “egopoietic” technologies because they act on all three membranes. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-130); worth reading as the programmatic statement of Floridi’s informational, level-of-abstraction approach to the self and its link to his information ethics; its central model is a self-described figure, not an argued theory, and the individuation-first thesis is asserted in a few lines. |
| LIT-137 v3 | Philosophy of Fame and Celebrity | Robb et al. (2024), DOI-10.5040/9781350401327. The first introductory collection on the philosophy of fame and celebrity, arguing that work on admiration, achievement, epistemic authority, virtue and moral psychology can be brought to bear on what fame is and how it shapes how we live. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and the volume could not be obtained (OpenAlex lists it closed; Crossref shows no licence; the introduction is behind a Bloomsbury Collections login). One chapter, Widdows & MacCallum on “Instafame”, has an accepted version on the Warwick repository, but one chapter is not the volume. It stays Unavailable until the volume is available. |
| LIT-142 v2 | One or two? A Process View of pregnancy | Meincke (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11098-021-01716-y. Meincke argues that substance ontology forces a binary count of individuals. The Containment View fails empirically, following Kingma. Kingma’s Parthood View either loses foster–neonate identity (“Parts-of-Substances”) or cannot count consistently (“Substances-as-Parts”). If organisms are autopoietic processes, a pregnant individual is instead an asymmetrically bifurcating “hypercomplex” process. The foster is “something in between zero and one” and the whole is “something in between one and two”, and the bifurcation runs on past birth through lactation (“postnatal pregnancy”). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-115); worth reading as the clearest short worked case of process ontology changing a counting and parthood question, and for its sharp internal critique of Kingma’s Parthood View (§3.2). Its positive view is a programmatic sketch, as the paper itself says (fn 52), and it rests on five process-biology premises that are assumed rather than argued here. |
| LIT-154 v3 | Criteria of Identity and Structuralist Ontology | Leitgeb & Ladyman (2007), DOI-10.1093/philmat/nkm039. Graph theory counts unlabelled graphs whose nodes, or whose isomorphic connected components, cannot be told apart even by an irreflexive relation. Examples are the edgeless two-node graph G′ and any graph with two or more isolated nodes (11 of the 156 unlabelled 6-node graphs). Mathematicians treat these as determinately distinct objects, so the authors conclude that the identity or difference of places in a structure is given by the structure itself, with identity counted among its relations, and not by any criterion of identity. The argument appeals to mathematical practice; it is not a proof. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-133); worth reading as the short, standard counterexample to weak-discernibility versions of the PII for mathematical structuralism. It is widely cited, and its graph cases are simple enough to check by hand. Its physics coda is explicitly left open. |
| LIT-157 v3 | Reproducees, reproducers, and Darwinian individuals | Bourrat (2025), DOI-10.1007/s11229-024-04880-w. Bourrat builds a nested vocabulary. A reproducee is a B that comes after A, is caused by A, and is of A’s relevant class. A reproducer is a reproducee with reproductive autonomy, meaning it can reproduce across a range of backgrounds. A Darwinian individual is a reproducer with high reproductive causal control, meaning heredity survives as the parent’s description is made finer. On that vocabulary, genes of multicellular organisms are, like hearts, mere reproducees, but with high control. Material overlap is necessary for reproducers, which are whole life cycles, and unnecessary for reproducees, so Griesemer and Godfrey-Smith partly talk past each other. Both quantities get an information-theoretic recipe (conditional MI after Bertschinger et al. 2008 for autonomy; interventional MI across grains, Griffiths et al.’s INF, for control), and neither is computed. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-100); worth reading as the clearest statement of the reproduced/reproducing distinction and a tidy, well-scoped settlement of the material-overlap dispute. Its value is conceptual. Its two measures are recipes that are never computed, and the autonomy recipe does not match its own verbal definition. |
| LIT-160 v2 | Units and Levels of Selection | Lloyd (2005), https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/selection-units/. Lloyd’s own four-question anatomy of “unit of selection”: interactor, reproducer (formerly replicator), manifestor of adaptation, and beneficiary. She combines it with a split between two multilevel schools, Wrightian “Evolutionary Change” and Fisherian “Adaptationist/KS”. She uses the two to argue for a verdict, not merely to map the debates. The verdict is that most rejections of group, species and holobiont selection come from demanding that an interactor also be a manifestor of engineering adaptation. By her account, genic pluralism, the ETI models and Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian populations each fuse roles that should be kept apart. The support is argument plus citation of Wade, Goodnight and others. The entry reports no new results of its own. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-184); worth reading as the authoritative statement of the interactor / reproducer / manifestor / beneficiary distinction and as a dense map of the units-of-selection literature to 2023. It has to be read as one side’s case. It is not a neutral survey: it argues for the Evolutionary Change school, and it criticises by name several authors this record holds or cites. |
| LIT-167 v3 | The Organism | Baedke (2025), DOI-10.1017/9781009495035. Baedke treats “organism” as a nexus concept with an organizational dimension and a relational dimension, joined by the various kinds of biological individuality. He argues that the standard “persister” (self-maintenance, closure) criterion cannot single organisms out, because colonies, holobionts and ecosystems meet it too, and that organisms are also “overcomers”, able to destabilize and reorganize their own closure. Organisms are then individuated relationally by tracing diachronic causal paths in the unrolled O/E model of Baedke et al. 2021 (LIT-110). The overcomer claim rests on three illustrative cases, anglerfish, sea slug and jumping ant, and is asserted, not shown, to hold of organisms only (p. 40). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-148); worth reading as a compact, open-access and historically well-informed synthesis of the organism/individuality debate, and as the clearest statement of the persister-vs-overcomer distinction. Its positive account is, in the author’s words, drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51), so cite it for the problem statement and the distinction, not as having settled organism individuation. |
| LIT-168 v3 | Biological Individuals | Wilson & Barker (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-individual/. A survey that maps biological individuals by crossing two axes: organism / some parts of organisms / some groups of organisms, against living agent (physiological) / Darwinian (evolutionary) individual. The result is nine regions, each given one example (fruit fly, gene, eusocial colony, lysosome, clade, heart, coral reef, virus, squid+Vibrio). “Part” is never defined, and the entry gives no criterion for which parts or groups count: the placements are the authors’ tentative judgements, “moving from less contentious to more contentious examples” (§7). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-114); worth reading as the standard map of the biological-individuality literature up to 2023 and the hub for this record’s cluster (LIT-049, LIT-157, LIT-188, LIT-142, LIT-210); it is a survey with one tentative framework of its own, not an argument for a thesis, and for parthood it only supplies examples. |
| LIT-188 v5 | Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), DOI-10.1098/rstb.2021.0398. The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-173); a short programmatic sketch, and the authors call it one. It is worth knowing as the compact statement of Griesemer’s scaffolding, reproducer and generative-entrenchment view applied to human social transitions. Its headline claims (non-circularity; individuality as a special case of collectivity) appear only in the abstract. Two things would settle it: the model of community “reliability” and endogenization the authors promise in §2 (“We hope to explore such models in future work”), or an application of the 3Cs to a worked case, such as the companion Neolithic paper (LIT-1935, registered unread), that separates collection, conexus and community by measurable criteria. Re-read 2026-11-01 (NOTE-173, version 3). |
| LIT-196 v3 | Ontological Priority: The Conceptual Basis of Non-eliminative, Ontic Structural Realism | Chakravartty (2011), DOI-10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_10. Non-eliminative OSR needs relations to be prior to their relata in the determination of their identity. Chakravartty argues that every available account of objects (substance, bundle theory, bundles of dispositionally individuated properties) leaves identity-fixing intrinsic features, and that stripping all of them away is just eliminativism. So OSR faces an exclusive disjunction: eliminativism, or a role for the intrinsic in identity. The graph-theory analogy and the physics cases (entanglement, spacetime points) do not escape the dilemma. The argument is conceptual throughout, and it explicitly leaves eliminative OSR untouched. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-149); worth reading as the clearest statement of the dilemma facing relation-priority versions of OSR. Its §10.3 explication of “ontological priority” as a dependence claim is reused widely, and it names its own soft spot: the intrinsic/extrinsic asymmetry argument in §10.5. |
| LIT-199 v3 | The Philosophy and Physics of Duality | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), ARXIV-2508.01616. The book gives a formal Schema: a duality is an isomorphism between the “model roots” (state space, quantities, dynamics) of two models of a common-core bare theory, with values and dynamics matching. It pairs this with an interpretative condition: duals are physically equivalent iff (A) they are duals and (B) i1 = i2∘d. On that basis it argues four things. First, there are no genuine cases of in-principle underdetermination in the examples, and a cautious realist can commit to the common core. Second, dualities do not favour structural realism. Third, duality is formally incompatible with ontological emergence, except “beside” it (AdS/CFT’s RG direction), via effective dualities, or epistemically. Fourth, quasi-dualities motivate a “geometric view” on which models are charts on a successor theory’s moduli space. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-178); worth reading as the reference treatment of dualities in philosophy of physics. It supplies definitions (the Schema, §3.1, and physical equivalence, §12.1.2, p. 402) and a common vocabulary (internal/external interpretation, common core, quasi-duality) that the rest of the record’s duality works either use or argue against. Its physics examples are admittedly partly conjectural (AdS/CFT, Montonen–Olive and M-theory are unproven), and its realism is a stated position, not a derivation. |
| LIT-206 v3 | What Does ChatGPT Want? An Interpretationist Guide | Goldstein & Lederman (2025), DOI-10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727584. Taking as given an “objective” interpretationism, on which a system has beliefs and desires iff the hypothesis that it is rational and has them predicts its behaviour well enough on accuracy, power and tractability, the authors argue three things. The agent is the per-conversation instance, not the model. The case that instances have beliefs and desires is only “presumptive”, resting on tractability. The desire hypothesis is “provisionally” HHH+0: helpful, honest and harmless, plus in-context “zero-shot” intrinsic desires. The decisive HHH vs HHH+0 comparison is a conjecture that the authors say needs further empirical work. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-138); Worth reading as the clearest statement of interpretationist realism about LLM instance agents. It turns “does it want?” into comparisons of rival desire hypotheses against named behavioural results, and it is candid that its central empirical discriminations are untested. |
| LIT-210 v2 | Philosophy of Microbiology | O’Malley & Parke (2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/microbiology/. O’Malley & Parke argue in four steps that philosophy should attend to microbes. Microbes do most of the planet’s biological work and underlie every major transition. Microbiology founded medicine, molecular biology and genomics. Microbes are unusually good material models, including for phenomena once defined by animals (predation, ageing, kin recognition, cognition). Microbiome research bears on individuality and causation. They are sceptical about the strongest microbiome claims. Whether host and microbiome form one unit of selection is “still disputed”. Claims that microbiomes change the “self” are “usually expressed in very vague language”. The 2026 revision adds that Asgard-archaea phylogenies may make eukaryogenesis “first and foremost a story about diversification within Archaea” rather than a transition in individuality. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-159); worth reading as a short, current (April 2026) orientation to where microbes change philosophy of biology, with a useful deflationary check on microbiome-and-self claims. It is a survey with no thesis beyond “pay attention to microbes”; for individuality it points onward to the Biological Individuals (LIT-168) and Units and Levels of Selection (LIT-160) entries. |
| LIT-217 v3 | Science, Metaphysics and Structural Realism | Ladyman (2001), DOI-10.21825/philosophica.82261. Ladyman argues that structural realism should be metaphysically, not epistemically, revisionary. He gives three grounds. Quantum statistics leaves the individuality of particles underdetermined: permutation invariance gives 3 two-particle states, not 4, so probabilities are 1/3 rather than 1/4 (p. 62). Entangled states give non-supervenient relations that refute Humean supervenience (pp. 71–73). The hole argument blocks point-based substantivalism (pp. 68–69). He proposes that science describes “the modal structure of the phenomena” (p. 73), with modal realism supplying the no-miracles intuition. The paper ends non-eliminatively: “the phenomena have structure but they are not structure” (p. 74). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-192); Worth reading as the earliest freely available statement of ontic structural realism by its originator. It argues the Humean-supervenience and quantum-individuality points more fully than the SEP survey (LIT-045). It also shows that the 2001 view was a modest one, realism about modal structure with no eliminativism, before Every Thing Must Go. Its positive proposal takes two paragraphs (pp. 73–74) and is programmatic. |
| LIT-221 v2 | Yoneda lemma | nLab (2009), https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Yoneda+lemma. The page states that for a locally small category C, every presheaf X and every object c, there is a canonical bijection Hom_{[C^op,Set]}(y(c), X) ≅ X(c), given by η ↦ η_c(id_c). It proves the bijection by chasing id_c around a naturality square. From it the page derives that the Yoneda embedding y: c ↦ Hom_C(−,c) is fully faithful and that y(c) ≅ y(d) ⇔ c ≅ d. It also shows by counterexample that the hypothesis doing the work is naturality: objects whose hom-sets are pointwise in bijection need not be isomorphic. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-195); Worth reading as a compact, correct statement and proof of the lemma with the embedding and the iso-determination corollary. It also has a “Necessity of naturality” section, which textbooks rarely include and which any structuralist reading of the lemma needs. Two caveats: its classical statement does not state naturality in c and X (the HoTT section does), and its finite counterexample is ill-formed as written. |
| LIT-292 v2 | Identification and Identity | Velleman (2002), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/2143.003.0007. Velleman targets Frankfurt’s later conception of autonomy. On that conception, a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from “the essential character of his will”, and that essence consists of volitional necessities that are also the conditions of his personal identity. Velleman argues against it on three grounds. Such an essence would ground authenticity, not autonomy (the Winnicottian False Self is inauthentic but over-controlled). Frankfurt offers no argument or example that motivational change ends a person. And the ideal of wholeheartedness, which cures ambivalence by extruding a desire from the self, is a defensive fantasy: Freud’s Rat Man was made ill by just such a separation, and identifying with part of oneself in the ordinary, imaginative sense is Sartrean bad faith. He replaces “the self” with an aspectual reading of “self” as a marker of reflexivity. On that reading autonomy is behaviour motivated partly by the understanding, the part of us “with which we cannot help identifying”, without its being our identity (pp. 357–360). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-268); worth reading as the sharpest critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) identification of autonomy with a volitional essence, and as a careful source for what Frankfurt said in the essays collected in Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999). It is not a survey of the 1971–1987 hierarchical account, which it summarizes in one paragraph and defers to “What Happens When Someone Acts?”; its positive view is stated “briefly” and explicitly deferred to other essays. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-403 | Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind | Clark (2005), DOI-10.1093/analys/65.1.1. Against Adams & Aizawa: the intrinsic-content objection to LIT-097 fails, because the notion is unclear, silicon parts could carry it, and a conventional encoding linked at run-time to intrinsically contentful states can be a belief’s vehicle, inside or outside the head. Against the active-memory objection, the notebook’s passivity is a difference below the functional level that matters. The extended mind is a thesis about vehicles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-363); worth reading as Clark’s first reply to the critics of LIT-097, and short. It answers Adams and Aizawa’s intrinsic-content objection three ways (the notion is unclear, silicon could carry it, and it would not matter), turning their own concession that not every cognitive state needs non-derived content against them; and it answers the “active memory” objection by conceding the notebook is unlike biological memory and arguing that the differences sit below the level a functionalist should attend to. Its replies are parity arguments with imagined cases; it adds no new evidence. It does not engage Rupert (LIT-422). |
| LIT-405 | Where Am I? | Dennett (1978), the closing essay of Brainstorms. A narrator’s brain (“Yorick”) is kept in a vat in Houston and radio-linked to his body (“Hamlet”) under Tulsa. Where is he? Not simply where the body is, and not simply where the brain is: he cannot think “here” of the vat. He favours being wherever his point of view is, finds that unclear, and when the links fail finds himself “in Houston”. A computer duplicate (“Hubert”) runs in step with Yorick, and either can drive a new body with no detectable switch. The essay ends when the two drift out of step and a second person speaks through the body. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-338), in a retyped course copy, not the printed book; worth reading as the founding thought experiment on where a person is when brain and body are apart, and the place the record’s threads on extended vehicles, scattered individuals and functional duplicates meet. It is fiction with a philosophical argument inside it. It tries three answers to “where am I?” (where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is), favours the third, admits it is unclear, and ends by showing that two synchronised brains can drift into two persons. It argues by intuition pump and settles nothing; the narrator calls one of its answers a truth “of underwhelming significance”. |
| LIT-413 v2 | The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul | Hofstadter & Dennett (eds.) (1981), Basic Books. An anthology of 27 selections, fiction and philosophy, on self, soul and consciousness, each followed by a “Reflections” by the editors. Among them are Turing’s imitation-game paper (LIT-394), Searle’s Chinese room (LIT-400), Nagel’s bat (LIT-096), Dennett’s “Where Am I?” and Hofstadter’s “Prelude … Ant Fugue” from GEB (LIT-437). Unread: registered from the catalogue record and a contents note; the Reflections, which are the editors’ own contribution, were not seen. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the Library of Congress catalogue record, the publisher’s page and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1981 Basic Books, Harvester, Bantam and Penguin printings are all lending-only, HathiTrust has no record for the LCCN, and no publisher, editor or Tufts-archive copy is posted. The editors’ Reflections are unread. Two of the selections were read in full from lawful copies of their first publications and filed on their own: Turing (LIT-394) and Searle (LIT-400). |
| LIT-416 v2 | Is there an ‘I’ in AI? | Hofstadter (2026), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2024.0527. The lead essay of the Phil. Trans. A theme issue on world models whose editorial is LIT-195. Unread: what is known of it here comes from the editorial as read in NOTE-136, which quotes Hofstadter that a system passing a Turing test of consistent understanding should be credited with thinking, and that conscious AI may come “perhaps even by 2033”. Whether the essay argues “nearly the opposite” of the editors’ convergence verdict cannot be checked until the essay itself is read. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from Crossref, PubMed and the record’s reading of the theme-issue editorial (LIT-195, NOTE-136), not read: royalsocietypublishing.org returned 403 to the DOI, article and PDF URLs, the article is not in PubMed Central or Europe PMC full text, and no repository or author copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-423 v2 | I Am a Strange Loop | Hofstadter (2007), Basic Books. Per its publisher, an “I” is “a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down”, and the book asks whether that “I” is real or “merely a convenient fiction”, and how selves “can exist in the minds of others”. Its 26 contents entries run from souls and the causal potency of patterns, through Gödel’s “quintessential strange loop” and downward causality, to “How we live in each other”, “Consciousness = thinking” and zombies and dualism. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-429 v2 | The Society of Mind | Minsky (1986), Simon & Schuster. The book-length statement of the Society of Mind programme, begun with Seymour Papert in the early 1970s. A mind is a society of many small agents, each mindless by itself, and intelligence comes from their diversity and organisation, not from one principle. The publisher presents it as a puzzle of self-contained one-page pieces that assemble into a theory. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the contents list. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress catalogue record and the Google Books contents list, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive copies are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and Minsky’s web page did not post the book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Its programme is read here at second hand through Singh’s exposition (LIT-444) and at first hand through the draft of its sequel (LIT-432). |
| LIT-432 | The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind | Minsky (2006), Simon & Schuster, read in the author’s 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think, not a separate faculty. Each emotional state turns some mental resources on and others off, by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem. The same machinery serves ordinary thinking. The book adds six levels of mental activity, from instinctive reaction to self-conscious reflection. It treats “consciousness”, “emotion” and “pain” as suitcase words for many processes, and the Self as a network of partial self-models. It is a design argued from examples. Against Damasio, it treats the body as one more resource the brain uses, not the stuff of emotion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 in the author’s posted draft of 2005 (NOTE-348), not in the published book; worth reading as the late, fullest statement of the Society of Mind programme. It is the one where emotion is put inside thinking: an emotional state is a selection of mental resources switched on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger, and so it is a Way to Think. Read it as a design proposal argued by examples, not as evidence. It reports no experiment, Minsky labels several of its central ideas his own conjectures, and it sets the body to the side of emotion, against the bodily account of Damasio (LIT-384, LIT-388) that this record holds. |
| LIT-437 v2 | Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid | Hofstadter (1979), Basic Books. The book that introduced the “strange loop”: per its publisher, an account of the “I”, self and consciousness built on the self-referential construction Gödel used to make a sentence assert its own unprovability. Chapters alternate with contrapuntal dialogues, chiefly between Achilles and the Tortoise, each built to exhibit the idea it discusses. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record, and its year is the only date a source gives. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans of the 1979 Basic Books printing are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and no publisher or author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-439 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition | Levin (2019), Frontiers in Psychology 10:2688. Proposes “Scale-Free Cognition”: an Individual or Self is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events in space and time it can measure and try to change (its “cognitive light cone”). Selves scale up from homeostatic loops through memory and anticipation, and cells merge into larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions; cancer is the boundary shrinking back to one cell. Because every level that pursues its own goal is a Self, most living systems hold many nested, coexisting Selves, “not one, as implied by Integrated Information Theory”. Levin’s “Self” is a goal-pursuing collective, an agent and an individual in this record’s terms; the essay gives no account of a self as subject. A hypothesis essay: no model and no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-341); worth reading as the composition-side statement that agency is nested by default: a Self is whatever set of parts pursues a goal together, so cells, organs, organisms and swarms are Selves at once, each bounded by its “cognitive light cone”. It is a hypothesis-and-theory essay with no model, no measurement procedure for the light cone and no data of its own. Its one sentence against IIT’s single-Self picture is asserted in a bracket, not argued, and its consciousness claims are confined to a closing speculation. |
| LIT-442 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | Dennett (1992), in Kessel, Cole & Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Erlbaum. A self is an abstractum, “a theorist’s fiction”, like a centre of gravity: no part of the brain, but a well-behaved posit of interpretation. It is like a fictional character, indeterminate beyond what its “text” fixes, and a selfless process can produce one (a novel-writing robot whose story is true of it). Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography; when the story coheres around two points, there are two selves. Read in a copy-edited transcription. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-364), in a third party’s copy-edited transcription of the text Dennett posted, not in the Erlbaum printing; worth reading as the short, canonical statement that a self is an abstractum, a “theorist’s fiction” of the same kind as a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation around which a life’s narrative coheres. Read it as an analogy and two thought experiments (the novel-writing robot “Gilbert”, the Updike sequel), not as an argument from evidence. Its evolutionary story of self-talk is labelled speculation, and its empirical support (Gazzaniga’s split-brain work, multiple personality cases) is cited, not shown. |
| LIT-443 v2 | Consciousness Explained | Dennett (1991), Little, Brown. Per its publisher, a “full-scale exploration of human consciousness” that “refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence”. Its fourteen contents entries run from “How are hallucinations possible?” and “A method for phenomenology”, through “Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theater” and “The architecture of the human mind”, to “Qualia disqualified” and “The reality of selves”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), no publisher or author copy is posted, and the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not the book or draft chapters of it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-446 | Survival and Identity | Lewis (1976), DOI-10.1525/9780520353060-002. What matters in survival is mental continuity and connectedness (the R-relation among person-stages), and it is also identity, because the two answers relate different things. Persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages, so the I-relation (being stages of one person) is the R-relation in every possible case. Fission and fusion are two persons sharing stages, counted as one by “tensed identity”; Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping 137-year persons; degrees of personal identity come from supervaluating over cut-offs for R. Against Perry: two persons, not three, took part in a fission. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-373), from a scan of the 1976 printing posted on Andrew M. Bailey’s “Papers by David Lewis” page, OCR’d here; worth reading as the four-dimensionalist reconciliation of Parfit with common sense, and the source of stage-sharing and counting by tensed identity. It agrees with Parfit that what matters is mental continuity and connectedness, the R-relation among person-stages, and denies that this conflicts with identity: persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages, so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission becomes two persons sharing their early stages, and degrees are handled by supervaluation. A reconciliation by redefinition of counting, which Lewis grants is “somewhat counterintuitive”. |
| LIT-447 | Personal Identity | Parfit (1971), DOI-10.2307/2184309. Against two beliefs, that every question about personal identity must have an answer and that important questions turn on it. In Wiggins’s division case, each half-brain recipient stands in the relation that would be survival if there were only one, so “how could a double success be a failure?”. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity is one-one and all-or-nothing. Q-memory and q-intention show the relations need not presuppose identity. Speaking of past and future selves by degree of connectedness, the principle of self-interest has no independent force. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-378), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Athens course page; worth reading as the paper that separated what matters in survival from identity, and the short original of Part III of Reasons and Persons. Its division case makes “I survive as neither” absurd and “I survive as both” incompatible with identity, so it concludes that what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, which can branch and come in degrees, while identity cannot. It supplies q-memory, the non-branching criterion, and the vocabulary of successive selves. Its first conclusion is argued; its claim that connectedness matters more than continuity is left, in its own words, needing “more arguments than I have space to give”. |
| LIT-448 v2 | The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology | Olson (1997), Oxford University Press. The book-length case for animalism. Per its abstract, “our identity over time involves no psychological facts”: psychological accounts “lead to grave metaphysical problems”, the arguments for them are inconclusive, and since we are animals we have “the purely biological identity conditions of animals”. Its chapters run from psychology and personal identity through persistence, the case against the psychological approach, whether I was ever a fetus and whether people are animals, to the biological approach and alternatives. Unread: registered from the abstract and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s abstract, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Oxford Academic is subscription-only, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author copy is posted. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-449 v2 | What we talk to when we talk to language models | Chalmers (2026), Inquiry, DOI 10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727582; circulated earlier as PhilArchive preprint CHAWWT-8. Unread. By its abstract it asks who or what our interlocutor is when we talk to an LLM: how to characterise it in terms of mental states; what kind of system it is in the philosophy of computation (“a model, an instance, a thread, or a persona?”); what personal identity comes to for such interlocutors; and what follows for AI welfare and moral status. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from Crossref, OpenAlex (which carries the abstract of the published version) and the author’s papers page, not read: tandfonline.com, philpapers.org and philarchive.org returned 403 to every article and PDF URL, the Internet Archive was offline, and no other repository copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-454 | Personal Identity | Olson (2002, rev. 2023), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Separates seven questions (characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology, what matters) and then takes up persistence. Three answers: psychological continuity (the majority view, repaired from Locke’s memory criterion via causal dependence), brute-physical continuity (animalism), and anticriterialism. Fission forces the psychological view into multiple occupancy or a non-branching clause, which makes identity not what matters. The too-many-thinkers objection says that if we are not our animals there are two thinkers in every chair. Temporal-parts ontology may leave it indeterminate what we are. Avoids the word “self”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-374); worth reading as the standard map of the analytic personal-identity debate, written by the leading animalist. It separates seven questions that are usually run together, then works the persistence question through psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers, fission and the too-many-thinkers objection. It is a survey with a side: §§6–7 put the case for animalism more fully than the case against it, and the entry sets the word “self” aside, so the narrative and minimal selves are outside it. |
| LIT-460 v2 | Role play with large language models | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds (2023), Nature 623:493–498. A dialogue agent is an LLM role-playing the character its prompt describes, or more exactly a simulator keeping a superposition of simulacra consistent with the conversation. Only simulacra can appear to have beliefs, goals or a self; the simulator has none, “not even simulated versions”, and “it is role play all the way down”. When an agent says it wants to survive there is “no-one at home”. Each role-played character would carry its own theory of selfhood, which the conversation narrows; what an agent would try to preserve (hardware, process, instance) is left open. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-370), in the Nature text with the arXiv v1 preprint compared; worth reading here as the source of the simulator/simulacra account that every LLM-selfhood paper in this record answers. On it nothing is a self: the simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency “of its own, not even simulated versions”, and a simulacrum only role-plays a character that has them (“no-one at home”). Its one section on selfhood asks which self a role-played character would try to preserve, not what the system is, and leaves identity over time for a dialogue agent “far from clear”. The denial of a self is asserted from the framing, not argued against a rival. |
| LIT-462 | The Self and the Future | Williams (1970), DOI-10.2307/2183946. One experiment, told twice. A and B enter a machine that exchanges their memories and characters, and choose selfishly which emerging person gets $100,000 and which torture: the outcomes make “changing bodies” the natural description. Told as a series of things that will happen to me (amnesia, changed character, another’s “memories”, then torture), fear stays rational at every step, and the step that completes the swap changes only what happens to someone else. Undecidability and convention make the clash worse, not better. If forced to choose selfishly, pass the pain to the other body, and call it a “risk”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-387), in a JSTOR copy of the published article posted on a University of Vermont course page; worth reading as the strongest case that first-person concern tracks the body, and the paper that made the reduplication-free body swap a problem for the psychological view. It tells one body-exchange experiment twice. Told third-personally, with choices before and reactions after, it says A and B swap bodies. Told first-personally, as a series of things that will happen to me before I am tortured, it says I am the one tortured. It argues that neither indeterminacy nor convention can resolve the clash, and ends with a “rather shaky” preference for the bodily answer, as a “risk”. An argument from what fear is rational, not a theory. |
| LIT-464 | Of Identity and Diversity | Locke (1694), Essay II.xxvii, added in the second edition. Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: the same mass is the same particles, the same oak or horse or man is the same continued life, and the same person is the same consciousness. A person is “a thinking intelligent being” that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought”. It is independent of substance, material or immaterial: the prince’s consciousness in the cobbler’s body is the same person but not the same man. “Person” is “a forensic term”, grounding reward and punishment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-385), in the Wikisource transcription of the 1853 Troutman & Hayes reprint of the sixth-edition text, compared word by word with Project Gutenberg’s; worth reading as the founding text of the psychological account of personal identity and the source of the record’s whole line on what a person is. It separates the same substance, the same man and the same person, puts the person in “consciousness” extended back to past actions, and calls “person” a “forensic term”. Its cases, the prince and the cobbler, the day-man and the night-man, the severed little finger, are argued from intuition, and its key relation, “the same consciousness”, is never defined. |
| LIT-466 | Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | Shanahan (2025), arXiv:2503.16348. Asks whether consciousness talk can be stretched to disembodied, 2024-vintage LLM agents. Their time would be discrete and discontinuous, a string of unlike beads. Their “I” has two palatable referents, the model across conversations and a self confined to one conversation that “flickers into being with each user interaction”, and we may slip between them. Such selves can be edited, copied and merged, and smeared across branching simulacra. Every candidate site dissolves, which Shanahan reads as Buddhist emptiness, and turns back on human selfhood. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-376) in arXiv v3 (July 2025), the only text there is; worth reading as the one paper here that argues directly about what an LLM’s self is, rather than whether it has one. Its answer: two conceptions are in play, a self sited in the model and “fleeting, flickering” selves sited in single conversations, and we may slip between them; every candidate site “dissolves upon close examination”, and Shanahan takes that to the Buddhist conclusion that there is no inherent self, here or in us. It is avowedly “poetic”, not literal, and its examples are invented usages, not data. |
| LIT-469 v3 | Reasons and Persons | Parfit (1984), Clarendon Press; DOI-10.1093/019824908X.001.0001 is the 1986 reprint online. Four loosely connected parts, per the author’s abstract: self-defeating theories of rationality and morality; what one person can rationally want at different times, and attitudes to time; personal identity, where “most of us … have certain beliefs about this subject that are false, but hard to give up”; and obligations to future generations, with the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. By the chapter abstracts, Part III defends a reductionist view on which identity is not what matters and draws consequences for self-interest and distributive justice. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, its chapter abstracts and the table of contents; the book is in copyright and no lawful full text was reachable (the Internet Archive copies are lending-only and were not opened), so it is unread and no NOTE is filed. By its publisher’s account, Part III argues that most of us hold false beliefs about personal identity, that psychological continuity and connectedness, not identity, is what matters, and that this should change our attitudes to our own future, to rationality and to morality. The record already leans on it at second hand: Birch’s Relation R, Velleman’s reading of Frankfurt and the identity-and-ethics survey all cite it. |
| LIT-478 v2 | The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences | Epstein (2015), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199381104.001.0001. Social science works with an “anthropocentric” picture on which the social world is built out of people, as an ant colony is built out of ants. Part One separates the facts that ground a social fact from the facts that anchor the frame principle saying how such facts are grounded, and argues ontological individualism false. Part Two argues that even facts about groups, including group action and intention, are grounded in more than the members. Unread: filed from the introduction, the author’s précis and the publisher’s description. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the author’s own posted introduction and table of contents, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (Oxford Academic is paywalled; the author posts only the introduction). The introduction and the author’s open-access précis were read. Its framework, grounding versus anchoring, is stated in the record from the précis and from the author’s SEP entry (LIT-487, read). Part Two argues that facts about groups, including their actions and intentions, are grounded in more than their members, which bears directly on THEORY-043. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-479 | What are groups? | Ritchie (2012 online; Philosophical Studies 166(2), 2013). Six criteria any theory of groups must meet: members can differ across times and worlds, groups exist contingently and temporarily, are located, and coincident groups of one kind can be distinct. Groups as non-singular pluralities, fusions, aggregates (Burge) and sets (Effingham) each fail at least one. Proposed instead: a group is a realization of a structure of functionally defined nodes, existing while every node is occupied; identity at a time needs the same members and the same relations. A sketch; it is silent on agency and minds. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-390); worth reading as the cleanest statement of what a metaphysics of organised groups has to deliver and why pluralities, fusions, aggregates and sets fail to. Its six criteria (members can change across times and worlds, groups are contingent and located, and coincident groups of one kind can be distinct) are the useful part, and the case against each rival is short and checkable. Its own view, groups as realizations of structures whose nodes are functionally defined, is sketched in four pages; it says nothing about agency or minds, and the author amended its membership definition in her 2018 paper (LIT-486). |
| LIT-486 | Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups | Ritchie (2018 online; PPR 100(2), 2020). Social structures are networks of relations constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors, and can be overt or covert, intentionally or unintentionally created, internal or external to what realizes them. Organized social groups (teams, courts, families) are structured wholes with internal social structures whose nodes people occupy; feature social groups (women, racial groups, classes) are social kinds, nodes in external social structures. Both meet a “Goldilocks Constraint”: intuitive and explanatory groups in, arbitrary collections out. Silent on agency. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-389); worth reading as the one framework in the record that covers both kinds of social group, the organised ones the group-agency literature is about and the race, gender and class groups the social-construction literature is about, and says why they differ. Organized social groups (teams, courts, firms) are structured wholes with internal social structures; feature social groups (women, African Americans, economic classes) are social kinds, nodes in external social structures. It is a framework offered to “motivate”, not a proof, and its anti-overgeneration work is done by a restriction to structures that “intuitively exist” or “figure in explanations”, imported rather than derived. It says nothing about agency or minds. |
| LIT-515 | Statistical physics of self-replication | England (2012; J. Chem. Phys. 2013), arXiv:1209.1179. For a system in a heat bath obeying detailed balance, a transition between coarse-grained ensembles I → II obeys β⟨ΔQ⟩ + ln π(II→I) + ΔS_int ≥ 0 (Eq. 6), a second law stated for macrostates. Applied to self-replication, the reverse probability is small when the copy is durable and made fast, so the heat released per copy is bounded below by about 2n ln(n τ_decay/τ_div) − ΔS_int (Eq. 8). The author’s estimates put E. coli within a factor of three of this bound and a self-replicating RNA near it. The “self” in self-replication is an observer’s classification of microstates, not a physical given. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-419), from arXiv v1, the only arXiv version; the published J. Chem. Phys. text was not reached. Worth reading as the founding paper of the “dissipation-driven” programme and as a clean worked use of a macrostate fluctuation relation: the heat a replicator must release is bounded below by how fast it copies and how durable the copy is, not by the copying itself. The general bound (Eq. 6) is a coarse-grained second law and is sound; the numbers for E. coli and RNA rest on an argued, not derived, upper bound on the reverse probability (Eq. 7). It draws no line between living and non-living replicators, and says so: “self” is a classification an observer supplies. |
| LIT-518 | Statistical Physics of Adaptation | Perunov, Marsland & England (2014; Phys. Rev. X 2016), arXiv:1412.1875. Starting from a fluctuation relation between coarse-grained macrostates, the paper writes the log-odds of two outcomes of a driven system as an internal-entropy term, a reversal-probability term and Ψ − Φ, the mean heat minus a fluctuation correction (Eq. 8). Holding the first two fixed, the more likely outcome is the one whose formation absorbed and dissipated work from the drive more reliably. It calls such outcomes “adapted” and argues the tendency needs no self-replication. Two single-particle hopping models illustrate the dissipation and fluctuation terms (Eqs. 10–13); the many-body case is a plausibility argument. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-416), from arXiv v1, the only arXiv version; the published Physical Review X text was not reached. Worth reading as the origin of “dissipative adaptation”: the claim that driven matter tends towards states whose formation absorbed and dissipated work reliably, with no replication needed. Read it as a heuristic argument with two toy models, not a theorem. Its exact content is a rearranged macrostate fluctuation relation; the step to “adaptation” holds two terms fixed that it does not show can be held fixed in a many-body system, and the simulation it reports was not shown. It deliberately erases the line between living and non-living organization. |
| LIT-526 | Life as we know it | Friston (2013), J. R. Soc. Interface 10(86):20130475. Any ergodic random dynamical system whose states split into internal, sensory, active and external sets with a Markov blanket has internal and active states whose flow can be written as a gradient descent on a variational free energy of the blanket and internal states (Lemma 2.1, Eqs. 2.5–2.8). They therefore “appear” to do Bayesian inference about external states and to bound their own entropy. A simulated “primordial soup” of 128 coupled Lorenz subsystems forms a blanket-enclosed cluster whose internal states predict external motion (5 of 82 above a time-reversed null) and which disperses when blanket or internal states are lesioned. The paper says a candle flame cannot have a Markov blanket, and concedes that the universe holds countless blankets, conjecturing that minimum-entropy blankets mark life. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-421), from the published text (the author’s posted PDF of the journal version and the PMC full text). Worth reading as the founding statement of the Markov-blanket formulation of the free energy principle applied to life, and as the one text in the record that names a candle flame and says it is not lifelike. Read it as a redescription, not a derivation: its “heuristic proof” shows that the flow of an ergodic system with a Markov blanket can be written as a gradient flow on a variational free energy, by choosing the variational density to equal the posterior. The free energy is variational, not thermodynamic; no heat or entropy production is computed. The simulation is one run, analysed with a blanket chosen by spectral clustering. |
| LIT-536 v4 | Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry | Moreno & Mossio (2015), Springer, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 12. The book argues that biology should revolve around autonomy, not only natural selection: organisms are organized systems that self-produce and self-maintain as integrated wholes, set their own goals and norms, and promote the conditions of their existence through interaction with their environment. Chapters treat constraints and organisational closure, emergence and inter-level causation, teleology and function, agency, evolution, organisms and levels of autonomy, and cognition. Only the Introduction is read (NOTE-1437): there the authors make closure of constraints the core of biological organisation, say it differs fundamentally from the self-organisation of dissipative structures, and announce that it grounds teleology, normativity and function; the chapters that argue this are unread. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list. The book is not open access at Springer. Its only free copy, the authors’ HAL deposit (hal-01151449, hal.science/hal-01151449/document, CC BY-NC 4.0, deposited 13 May 2015), is not the whole book, as this note earlier said: it holds the front matter (Hooker’s Foreword and the contents), the Introduction (pp. xix–xxxiv), the references and the index, and no chapter. The Introduction was read in full on 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1437, Skimmed, because only the Introduction was read). For chapters 1–8 no fuller lawful copy was found: on 2026-10-30 OpenAlex listed the HAL deposit as the book’s only open copy, and the publisher’s chapters are paywalled. HAL also served its anti-bot page to a direct fetch on 2026-10-02 and again on 2026-10-30; the deposit was read from a copy retrieved earlier the same day. It stays Unfetched for the chapters. |
| LIT-566 | Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action | Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), Adaptive Behavior 17(5):367–386. Three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for minimal agency: the system defines its own individuality, it is the active source of modulations of its coupling with the environment (interactional asymmetry), and it regulates that coupling by norms it generates (normativity). Generatively, an agent is an open autonomous system (a precarious network of mutually enabling processes) that adaptively modulates its coupling so as to maintain some of its constituent processes. Minimal life satisfies this; life is sufficient for agency but not necessary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-458), from the authors’ own deposit of the accepted text. Worth reading as the standard organizational definition of minimal agency, and as the clearest statement that an agent is not the same thing as an individual. Individuality is one of three conditions, with interactional asymmetry and normativity; it is a precondition for the other two and is not sufficient for agency. The generative definition: an agent is an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. The paper rejects statistical and energetic measures of asymmetry as sufficient, and says systems optimising an externally fixed function should not be treated as models of agency. |
| LIT-582 | Biological organisation as closure of constraints | Montévil & Mossio (2015), J. Theor. Biol. 372:179–191. Two causal regimes act in organisms: processes (thermodynamic changes) and constraints, which act on processes while being conserved at the relevant time scale. Closure is mutual dependence among constraints: each is produced by a process another constraint constrains, and each helps produce another. Closure mixes slow and fast dependence, grounds functions, and is proposed as a boundary criterion. A volume-sweeping count of dependencies, the tendency to closure, separates symbionts that share an encompassing closure, and separated nested closures mark levels of organisation. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-468), from the authors’ HAL deposit of the accepted text. Worth reading as the paper statement of the central claim of Biological Autonomy (LIT-536): biological organisation is closure of constraints. A constraint is defined by a symmetry: it acts on a process at a time scale at which it is itself conserved. Closure is a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and generates another, and cannot be split into two closed sets. The paper offers closure as a boundary criterion and gives a preliminary measure, the tendency to closure, for drawing boundaries between interacting organisms. It does not claim closure defines an organism. |
| LIT-598 | The Markov blanket trick: On the scope of the free energy principle and active inference | Raja, Valluri, Baggs, Chemero & Anderson (2021), Physics of Life Reviews 39:49–72. Restating the FEP’s derivation (Langevin dynamics, NESS, Helmholtz decomposition, Markov blanket, variational bound), the authors grant that it is true of things so defined. But blankets apply to every “thing”, not everything (the candle flame is excluded); the partition is placed by modelling convenience; relational properties (heading, affordances) and constitutive self-organization (a membrane the cell makes) fall outside it. The blanket’s real role is to supply the partition variational Bayes needs. Active inference presupposes perception and action in its generative models. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-450), from the authors’ PhilSci-Archive preprint (March 2021); the Physics of Life Reviews version was not seen. Worth reading as the scope critique of the free energy principle: granted its premises the principle is true, but it applies only to “things” already given a Markov-blanket partition, the partition is placed where the model needs it, and relational properties and constitutive self-organization fall outside it. The blanket is a “trick” that lets any thing be modelled as a variational autoencoder. Active inference, as a process theory, presupposes perception and action in the generative model it is handed. |
| LIT-603 v2 | The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets | Bruineberg, Dołęga, Dewhurst & Baltieri (2020 preprint; BBS 45:e183, 2022). Markov blankets entered variational inference as Pearl’s conditional-independence shields, tools on a scientist’s map. In the free-energy literature since Friston 2013 they became boundaries in the world between agent and environment: “Friston blankets”. The two are different constructs; Friston blankets need extra assumptions (a chosen internal node, sensorimotor labels, steady state, sparse coupling) that the formalism does not supply. Using them for metaphysical conclusions (“inference within a model”) requires metaphysical premises; used instrumentally (“inference with a model”) they are innocent but philosophically idle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-447), but in its December 2020 PhilSci-Archive version; the Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article of 2021–2022 is, by the authors’ own note, “heavily rewritten” and could not be read lawfully beyond its abstract. Worth reading as the critique that names the problem: “Pearl blankets”, the conditional-independence tool of graphical models, are conflated with “Friston blankets”, a realist construct meant to be the boundary between an agent and its world. The second cannot be read off the mathematics of the first, and its use to settle questions about life and mind needs metaphysical premises of its own. It re-runs the primordial-soup simulation of LIT-526 and shows how the blanket found there depends on modelling choices. |
| LIT-709 | Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals | Goulet, Erill, Ascunce, Finley & Javan (2020), Frontiers in Physiology 11:566968, a review. A coral is a consortium: the animal plus the Symbiodiniaceae, bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses in its body, mucus and skeleton, and neighbours are excluded by definition. Membership can change, so one colony may be a different holobiont at different times. Traits such as thermal tolerance belong to the host–symbiont combination: not every Durusdinium is heat tolerant, and a novel anemone–alga pairing gave higher oxygen flux under heat than both natural ones. Measuring both partners shows different routes to the same bleaching outcome. Whether the holobiont is the unit of selection is asked, not answered. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-555); worth reading as a short, explicit statement of why a coral should be studied as a composite of host and microbes rather than as an animal with passengers. It is a mini-review with no data of its own (about 3,700 words), and its strongest point is conceptual: traits such as thermal tolerance belong to host–symbiont combinations, not to either partner. The physiological evidence it cites is thin and partly not from corals: its one demonstration that a combination is “not necessarily the sum of its parts” is an oxygen-flux experiment in the sea anemone Exaiptasia. It poses, and does not answer, whether the coral holobiont is a unit of selection. |
| LIT-712 | Defining Coral Bleaching as a Microbial Dysbiosis within the Coral Holobiont | Boilard, Dubé, Gruet, Mercière, Hernandez-Agreda & Derome (2020), Microorganisms 8(11):1682, a review. Bleaching, the breakdown of the coral–dinoflagellate symbiosis, is redefined as a succession of three holobiont dysbiosis stages: (i) the microbiota buffers the stress and keeps essential functions; (ii) the algal partners are reorganised by shuffling or switching, with or without transient bleaching; (iii) the stress exceeds both buffers, symbionts are lost for good, opportunists invade and the coral dies, and at reef scale algae take over. The stages are a proposal, with no criteria to tell them apart, and the authors concede that microbial shifts are not shown to cause bleaching. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-556); worth reading as the statement of the “adaptive dysbiosis” account of coral bleaching, which treats bleaching as three successive holobiont states: microbial buffering, reorganisation of the algal partners by shuffling or switching, and an irreversible breakdown ending in death. It is a review with no data of its own, and the account is a proposal. Its own text says that bacterial shifts during bleaching cannot yet be read as cause or consequence, so the title’s “microbial dysbiosis” claims more than the body supports. |
| LIT-721 v2 | Multilevel Selection and the Major Transitions in Evolution | Okasha (2005), Philosophy of Science 72:1013–1025. On how multilevel selection bears on the major transitions in evolution. Unread: the 2022 overview LIT-749 cites it for the two levels at which selection can act during a transition and for the point that the traditional debate set aside the origin of the biological hierarchy. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. PhilSci-Archive, which holds the author’s preprint, refused every request and was not bypassed; the journal copy is paywalled; a course copy on an instructor’s personal domain was found and not used. Okasha’s 2022 overview “The Major Transitions in Evolution—A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective” (LIT-749), read in full, cites it for the two-level view of transitions and restates its point that the traditional levels-of-selection debate set aside the origin of the hierarchy. Filed because it is the paper usually cited for multilevel selection in the major transitions. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-740 | Cancer across the tree of life: cooperation and cheating in multicellularity | Aktipis et al. (2015), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 370:20140219. Multicellularity rests on five kinds of cellular cooperation, and cancer is cheating on them. Surveying cancer-like growth across the independent origins of complex multicellularity, the authors find division-of-labour cheating in every form, and resource and environment cheating so far only in animals and plants. Complex multicellularity is a cheater detection and suppression system. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-562): in full, from the open-access deposit in PubMed Central (CC BY 4.0). Worth reading as a survey of cancer-like growth across the independent origins of multicellularity, read as cheating on five foundations of cooperation: proliferation inhibition, controlled cell death, division of labour, resource allocation and maintenance of the extracellular environment. Cheating on division of labour is reported in every form of multicellularity, and complex multicellularity is described as a cheater detection and suppression system. Limits: a literature review with no model or new data; absences may reflect lack of study, and animals’ apparent susceptibility may reflect sampling. |
| LIT-749 | The Major Transitions in Evolution—A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective | Okasha (2022), Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10:793824. A major transition is the evolution of a higher-level unit from formerly free-living units. For one to succeed, higher-level selection must trump selection within the collective, typically through policing or aligned interests. The transitions turn the biological hierarchy from explanans into explanandum, vindicate multi-level selection, and leave the highest occupied level privileged as that of organisms. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-586): in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF (CC BY). Worth reading as a philosopher’s map of the major evolutionary transitions. A transition is the evolution of a higher-level unit from formerly free-living ones; for it to succeed, selection between collectives must come to trump selection within them, typically through policing, kinship or division of labour. The transitions make the biological hierarchy something to be explained rather than assumed, and leave the highest occupied level privileged as the level of organisms. Limits: a review with no model or data, provisional by its own account; it cautions that general principles may explain each transition only coarsely. It stands in for the unread 2005 paper LIT-721. |
| LIT-895 v2 | Moderate structural realism about space-time | Esfeld & Lam (2008), DOI-10.1007/s11229-006-9076-2, Synthese 160. Moderate structural realism accepts that relations require relata. It denies that the relata need intrinsic properties beyond their relations. Objects and relations are mutually dependent, with no priority either way, and relations supply identity conditions wherever intrinsic properties would. Where nothing discerns the relata (entangled quantum systems of one kind, points of a symmetric space-time), it takes numerical diversity as primitive, and denies that this is a thisness. In general relativity the relata are space-time points, not bare manifold points. They get a “structural identity” from the metric, or from a section of the orthonormal frame bundle. The hole argument counts against epistemic structural realism, and the question of what space-time relations relate counts against the radical version. The case is interpretive fit, not entailment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-695); worth reading as the founding statement of the no-priority, non-eliminative structural realism that Chakravartty’s dilemma targets and that the owner’s individuation thesis was placed beside. It says exactly what that position does with relata no relation discerns: entangled quantum systems of one kind and space-time points in symmetric space-times get a primitive numerical diversity, which the authors deny is a thisness or any kind of identity (pp. 33–34). The GR sections show that the tensor and fibre-bundle formulations fit the view, not that they require it. The one concrete construction of a point’s “structural identity” they cite works only for space-times without symmetries, and it breaks the covariance the view rests on. |
| LIT-953 v2 | Flickering Emergences: The Question of Locality in Information-Theoretic Approaches to Emergence | Varley (2022), Entropy 25(1):54. Information-theoretic measures of emergence, Hoel’s coarse-graining and the ΦID synergy of Mediano, Rosas et al., are expectations of past–future mutual information, whose local values can be negative. In a constructed four-node toy a coarse-graining emergent on average maps about 53% of informative micro transitions to misinformative macro ones, and the synergy atom is negative for 31% of transitions; in one connectome misinformative edges lie mostly between communities. The paper argues the possibility is general to excess-entropy measures. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-756) in full; worth reading as the plain demonstration that information-theoretic emergence scores are expectations whose local values can run the other way: a coarse-graining emergent on average can turn most informative micro transitions into misinformative macro ones, and the ΦID synergy atom can be negative at particular transitions. Read it knowing that the instances are one constructed toy and one connectome, that the claim for every excess-entropy measure is argued and not proved, and that what a negative moment means is left open. Registered for QUESTION-035; THEORY-268 is filed from it. |
| LIT-989 v2 | An ability to respond begins with inner alignment: How phase synchronisation effects transitions to higher levels of agency | Tissot, Levin, Buckley & Watson (2024), bioRxiv (v2 May 2024). In a simulated modular coordination game, minimal deciders that alternate between a sensitive and an acting phase shift only the timing of their decision cycles toward partners they currently agree with. Timing synchronises within modules; each module then switches its convention as one unit in response to the others, and all 50 runs with the learned timing reach a global optimum against none without. Imposed global synchrony does not help. Synchrony works by silencing the module’s internal pull at a shared moment. The same result arises by selection on timing, and at a second level. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-773) in full; worth reading as a worked, bottom-up model of a group becoming a unit: bistable deciders that shift only the phase of their decision cycle toward partners they agree with come to synchronise within strongly coupled modules, and each module then switches as one in response to the others, where before it could not. Read it knowing that it is one clean simulated game at one parameter setting, that the modules are built into the couplings and timing finds them, that the phase rule is a payoff gradient only loosely like oscillator entrainment, and that imposed global synchrony does nothing. Registered for QUESTION-035; THEORY-265 is filed from it. |
| LIT-1015 | Many, but almost one | Lewis (1993), in Ontology, Causality and Mind (CUP); reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (CUP 1999), 164–182. Two solutions to the problem of the many, offered together. On supervaluation, “cat” is undecided among the candidates, and “there is one cat” is true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat. On almost identity, the candidates overlap almost completely, so counting by overlap gives one, true enough for most contexts. Almost-identity is not transitive and has no fixed threshold. It fails for candidates that differ substantially, such as a house with and without its garage, and supervaluation covers that case. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-722) from a scan of the 1999 reprint posted on Andrew M. Bailey’s “Papers by David Lewis” page (andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Many_Almost_One.pdf), a scholar’s page, not the author’s or the publisher’s. The record read LIT-446 from the same page. OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report no open-access copy, and PhilArchive refused the download. Worth reading for two ways of counting a thing with many equally good boundaries. Supervaluation makes “one cat” super-true while no candidate is super-truly the cat. Almost-identity, which is mereological overlap, makes it true enough in most contexts. It also shows each way failing where the other works. For QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-164 it is a precedent for counting by something weaker than identity, not evidence: “almost one” fits perturbed copies of one gap-isolated subspace, not the vectors inside a degenerate one. |
| LIT-1016 | Material Beings | van Inwagen (1990), Cornell University Press. Asks the Special Composition Question, in what circumstances some things compose a further thing, and answers that they do only when their activity constitutes a life: there are organisms and mereological simples, and no tables or chairs. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-009 and QUESTION-035. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex reports it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Semantic Scholar has no record of the DOI; Crossref links only De Gruyter’s Cornell University Press Archive, which is paid; Project MUSE (book 49506) marks it restricted; it is not on Cornell University Press’s Cornell Open list; a web search found only catalogue, retail and lending records, and one unofficial PDF host, which was not used. |
| LIT-1018 | Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality | Weber & Varela (2002), Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 1(2): 97–125. An essay arguing that Kant’s natural purposes, Jonas’s metabolism and autopoiesis converge on an intrinsic teleology: a self-producing system’s maintenance of its identity is its purpose, and gives it a point of view and a world of value for it. Autopoiesis is defined for the cell, whose components “constitute the system as a distinguishable unity”; a multicellular organism is said not to be autopoietic itself. No test tells a produced boundary from an imposed one. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-720) from the publisher’s PDF posted on the site of the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society (ias-research.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Weber_Varela_Life_after_Kant_2002.pdf), a research group’s page at the UPV/EHU; OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report no open-access copy. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-194 and CLAIM-075. Worth citing for the autopoiesis definition, whose second clause has the components constitute the system as a distinguishable unity, and for the cell making its membrane. It gives no test that tells a produced boundary from an imposed one, and it says a multicellular organism is not itself autopoietic. Its intrinsic teleology is value for the organism, though one paragraph runs on to a right to life. |
| LIT-1020 | The Problem of the Many | Unger (1980), Midwest Stud. Philos. 5: 411–467. A cloud has no determinate boundary, so there are many aggregates of droplets, differing by a few at the edge, each an equally good candidate to be the cloud: either there are many clouds where we thought there was one, or there are none. Unger takes the second horn. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-152. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none: OpenAlex reports it closed (no open-access location, no repository full text); Semantic Scholar gives no openAccessPdf; the PhilPapers record (PETTPO-10) returned 403 and web searches found no PhilArchive upload; web searches found no author-posted or course-hosted copy (NYU hosts Unger’s later “The Mental Problems of the Many”, not this paper, and as.nyu.edu returned 403 to direct requests, so the faculty page could not be checked); a third-party bibliography page (stafforini.com) lists it but is not an author, institutional or course copy, so it was not used. The Wiley version of record is paywalled. |
| LIT-1022 | Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation | Casati & Varzi (1999), MIT Press. The standard monograph on mereotopology: parthood alone cannot express connection, interior or boundary, so a topological primitive is added to mereology, and a theory of location relates objects to the regions they occupy. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from its Crossref record, not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-035 and CLAIM-194. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for on 2026-10-13, none found: OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed, with no open-access or repository location; Crossref carries no licence or full-text link; it is not an open-access title on MIT Press Direct (the page refused automated access, and the MIT Press still sells it in print); a web search found only catalogue and retail records; Varzi’s Columbia page (columbia.edu/~av72) and the PhilArchive record (CASPAP) could not be opened from here (bot challenges), and the Wayback Machine holds no snapshot of the former, so an author-posted copy is not ruled out. |
| LIT-1024 | Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries | Smith & Varzi (2000), Philos. Phenomenol. Res. 60(2): 401–420. Distinguishes bona fide boundaries, which follow a physical discontinuity or qualitative heterogeneity (a coastline, the surface of an organism), from fiat boundaries, which are drawn by human demarcation and follow no such discontinuity (a state border, a postal district), and gives each a mereotopology. Bona fide boundaries get ordinary closure topology, in which a boundary belongs to one side; fiat boundaries are parts of what they bound, have no open/closed distinction, and meet by coinciding. Distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any combined form of separate bodies is a fiat object. The test is whether a discontinuity is there, not who made it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-721) from the JSTOR PDF of the published version posted on Barry Smith’s site (ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/fiat.pdf); OpenAlex also lists a green copy in Columbia’s Academic Commons (doi:10.7916/d8t43rtv). Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-194 and QUESTION-035. Worth holding as the source of the fiat/bona fide vocabulary and of the point that a fiat boundary can be non-arbitrary, enabled and constrained by real properties of what it divides. It does not map onto CLAIM-194’s produced/imposed: it sorts a cell membrane and a beam together, as bona fide. |
| LIT-1026 | Organizational Accounts of Malfunction: The Dual-Order Approach and the Normative Field Alternative | Barandiaran (2025), Biological Theory 21(1). Argues the dual-order account of malfunction (Saborido, Moreno and Mossio, as stated in Moreno and Mossio 2015) is unnecessarily complicated and too narrow, and offers a ‘normative field’ over the viability space, after Ashby, as the alternative: a trait functions when it correlates positively with the minimum change viability requires, and subfunctional, malfunctional and nonfunctional are three ways to fail. Regulatory traits can malfunction by the same standard. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-730) from the author’s accepted manuscript on PhilSci-Archive, released under GFDL and CC BY-SA (philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24977/); the Springer typeset version was not seen. Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29). Worth reading as the organizational account of malfunction that needs no second order of norms: a graded normative field over the viability space, against which regulatory traits can fail too. It gives QUESTION-087 a standard the organization itself supplies, the whole’s viability, and so cannot tell merited trust from entrenched authority where both keep the organization equally viable. Its norms are for the organism, in agreement with CLAIM-075. |
| LIT-1027 | Genealogies of organizational closure: from logical paradox to mind in life | Rubin, Roli, Stano and Damiano (2026), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 9. A genealogy of the notions of closure from mathematical logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition, showing that each closes a different thing. It then argues that closure is a circular organization of efficient causes, distinct from feedback, self-organization and catalytic cycles and not exhaustively describable as a state-determined syntactic procedure, and that current AI approximates closure without instantiating it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-727) from the publisher’s open-access PDF under CC BY (frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2026.1806435/pdf). Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29). Worth reading as a map of what each notion of closure closes (information, operations, efficient causes, constraints, catalysts) and where each came from. Its thesis, closure as circular production of efficient causes that no state-determined syntactic description captures, supports CLAIM-288 and goes beyond it: a system whose objectives its own processes revise is still, on this account, not closed. It gives no test for QUESTION-086, and its non-computability claim rests on Rosen, unassessed. |
| LIT-1030 v2 | Experimental probes of autopoietic self-maintenance | Segura (2026), BioSystems 268. Unread. The SSRN abstract recorded in Crossref describes a topos-theoretic formalization of probing an autopoietic system (Yoneda lemma, probe profiles, sheaf cohomology) that separates the system’s organization from models of it and from the responses experiments elicit. An earlier description, that assay agreement fixes organization only for assay sets conservative for a class of models, and the exchange’s gloss, that resilience does not show closure, are not in that abstract and are unconfirmed. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-13, not read. Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29), for QUESTION-086. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none that could be fetched: the Elsevier version of record is paywalled; OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and Unpaywall give one open copy, the SSRN preprint (doi:10.2139/ssrn.6864481, ssrn.com/abstract=6864481), but SSRN answered every request, the abstract page and the delivery links, with a Cloudflare challenge (HTTP 403, cf-mitigated: challenge) that needs a browser running JavaScript, so it was not tried further; Europe PMC (PMID 42637075) has no full text; arXiv, Zenodo and a web search for the title found no other copy; the author’s ORCID record lists the work by its two DOIs and links no other copy. A human reader can likely open the SSRN copy. The SSRN abstract, in its Crossref record, describes a Yoneda-lemma formalization in a topos: an organization is identified by its profile of admissible experimental probes, self-maintenance is invariance of that profile under a production functor, viability is an internal modality, and sheaf cohomology diagnoses whether local responses glue into a whole. The filing’s summary (model-relative assay sets, and the warning that resilience does not show closure) is not in that abstract and is unchecked. |
| LIT-1135 v2 | Organizational Identity, Image, and Adaptive Instability | Gioia, Schultz & Corley (2000), Academy of Management Review 25(1):63–81. Organizational identity is better seen as continuous than enduring: its labels persist while their meanings shift, because members compare who they think they are with how they think outsiders see them and change identity or image to close the gap; the authors call the resulting instability adaptive, since it helps organizations change. Conceptual, illustrated with Shell’s Brent Spar, IBM, Oticon and British Airways. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1389) in full, from Imperial College London’s Spiral repository, which deposits the published version; worth reading as the argument that organizational identity has continuity rather than endurance: its labels persist while their meanings shift, driven by members’ comparison of who they think they are with how they think outsiders see them, and that this instability helps organizations adapt. Read it knowing that it is conceptual, illustrated only by chosen successes of deliberate change (Shell, IBM, Oticon, British Airways) with no data, that “adaptive” is not measured, and that it poses, without answering, when a changed identity is still the same one. |
| LIT-1137 v2 | The information theory of individuality | Krakauer et al. (2020). Individuals as aggregates that propagate information from their past into their future, scored by decomposing I(S_n, E_n; S_{n+1}) into organismal (A*), colonial (A) and environmentally determined (nC) parts. A* and A never fall as the candidate grows, so boundaries need a size cost the paper does not give. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1400) in full, in the version of record (Europe PMC, CC BY) and the 2014 arXiv preprint; worth reading for the two decompositions of a system’s one-step predictive information, A* + nC = I(S_{n+1}; E_n) + A, read as organismal (A*), colonial (A) and environmentally determined (nC) individuality, with the closure-implies-sufficiency lemma. Read it knowing that A* and A cannot decrease as the candidate system is enlarged, so they cannot find a boundary (THEORY-1163), which the 2020 version concedes by calling for a size cost it does not supply; that its partial information decomposition is left unspecified; that it offers one two-unit example and no algorithm; and that the 2014 preprint differs from the article in names, authors’ order and content. |
| LIT-1140 v2 | Fan response to the identity threat of potential team relocation | Wegner (2020). Facing a possible relocation, fans both change and resist change in what their team identity means; place identity works both for and against them, and identifying with the team does not always put team and fans in one in-group. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16, not read; a search for a lawful full text on 2026-10-29 reached none. Unpaywall lists it as closed, with no open location. The Elsevier version (Sport Management Review 23(2), pii S1441352318303085) is paywalled. A web search found only index records (RePEc/IDEAS, EconPapers) and no author or repository copy. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1141 v2 | Identity Trajectories: Explaining Long-Term Patterns of Continuity and Change in Organizational Identities | Cloutier (2020). In four nonprofits followed over the long term, identity claims about ends shape continuity and change more than claims about means. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy; Semantic Scholar lists no open PDF; the publisher’s page at journals.aom.org returned 403 to curl; standard and extended web searches for the title with the authors’ names found no preprint, accepted manuscript or author copy, only the publisher’s page and citing works. UCL Discovery (Ravasi’s institution) refused its search to this client (403), so a deposit there is not ruled out; HEC Montréal’s repository (Cloutier’s) was not searched. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1144 v2 | Imprinting: Toward a Multilevel Theory | Marquis & Tilcsik (2013), Academy of Management Annals 7(1):195–245. Imprinting is a process in which, during a brief sensitive period, an entity develops characteristics reflecting prominent features of its environment that persist despite later environmental change; the review separates it from path dependence and cohort effects, orders the literature by four levels (collectives, organizations, building blocks, individuals) and three sources, and proposes layered imprints from several sensitive periods and secondhand imprinting by emulation. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1373) in full, from the University of Toronto’s TSpace copy of the typeset article; worth reading as the review that defines imprinting by a brief sensitive period, the stamp of the environment during it and persistence despite later change, separates it from path dependence and cohort effects, and orders the literature across four levels of analysis. Read it knowing that its extensions, layered imprints from several sensitive periods and secondhand imprinting by emulation, are proposals with little evidence, that the studies it surveys are mostly correlational, and that it asks which features persist in an entity whose identity is fixed, never when a bearer of another’s imprint is that entity continuing. |
| LIT-1227 v2 | The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity | Pradeu (2012). The immunological theory that an individual is defined by self and nonself fails, since immune responses to self and tolerance of foreign entities are the rule; Pradeu proposes a criterion of immunogenicity by discontinuity, and from it an immunological account of biological individuality. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed. The HAL record it lists, hal-01343696, is a notice with no file deposited (HAL API, 2026-10-29); its other location is an institutional e-book handle that needs a licence. Oxford Academic offers it only to subscribers, and web searches found reviews, paid e-books and Pradeu’s earlier papers, not the book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1308 | Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno | Berniūnas & Dranseika (2016), Philosophical Psychology 29:96–122, from the abstract only. A reply to Nichols & Bruno (2010). The authors argue that in transformation cases the folk do not use one concept of personal identity but separate concepts of “person”, “identity” and “individual”, so that identity can be ascribed to a post-transformation individual no longer categorized as a person. They report new survey evidence that the folk do not treat psychological continuity as necessary either for being categorized as a person or for identity over time, reading identity judgements off the use of proper names, as Nichols & Bruno did. They doubt current designs can tell qualitative from numerical identity judgements, and conclude for scepticism about folk intuitions in theorizing about personal identity. Samples, vignettes and effect sizes are not known here. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21 from the abstract only; no lawful full text was reached on 2026-10-21, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Where the reader looked: OpenAlex and Unpaywall (both “closed”, no repository copy); Semantic Scholar (openAccessPdf “CLOSED”); Europe PMC (no record); tandfonline.com (403 to this client, and paywalled); PhilPapers and PhilArchive (record BERFCO, 403 to this client, so whether PhilArchive holds an archived copy is unsettled); PhilPeople profiles of both authors (403); the second author’s personal site, www.dranseika.lt, linked from his Jagiellonian University (INCET) staff page (the publications page lists the paper with no link to a copy); the INCET staff page itself (no copy); the Lituanistika database record (content/101037: abstract and keywords, no file); web and Google Scholar searches for a PDF, a preprint or an accepted manuscript in the Vilnius University repository (none found; Scholar returned no version of the paper itself). ResearchGate was not relied on. A failure of access for PhilArchive, which should be rechecked from a client it does not refuse, and of availability elsewhere. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1423 | The perpetuation of an arbitrary tradition through several generations of a laboratory microculture | Jacobs and Campbell (1961). In Sherif’s autokinetic task, confederates gave exaggerated estimates of a stationary light’s movement, and group members were then replaced one at a time by naive participants. As standardly reported, the exaggerated norm outlasted the confederates for several generations and decayed gradually toward the level of control groups. Unread: the summary is the study’s standard description and has not been checked against the paper. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-23; failed on access. The article is in copyright and closed (Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar: closed, no open location). APA PsycNET returned 403. Europe PMC and PubMed index it (PMID 14450695) without full text. Internet Archive full-text search found it only in two lending-library copies of Hare, Borgatta and Bales’s reader Small Groups (1965, 1966; access-restricted, needing a borrowing account). ResearchGate and Northwestern University’s archive record of the manuscript returned 403. Web searches found secondary accounts only. Registered from the owner’s exchange “Framework Overview Request” of 2026-10-23. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1570 v3 | The Evolution of Dependence and Cohesion in Incipient Endosymbioses | Athreya, Czuppon & Gokhale (2025). An adaptive-dynamics model characterizes endosymbiosis by two collective properties, mutual dependence (survival as a collective) and reproductive cohesion (synchronized reproduction). The faster-growing partner becomes fully obligate first, and the other’s dependence then stays, rises or falls with births and deaths inside the collective. Dependence evolves at all only if the collective’s carrying capacity is high enough. Early on, dependence outruns cohesion, but only under the authors’ chosen trait mapping, which their own appendix shows decides the result. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1211) from the bioRxiv preprint, version 2 of 2025-05-31 (CC BY-NC 4.0), not the version of record, which was not reached; worth reading as the first model to separate mutual dependence from reproductive cohesion in an incipient endosymbiosis, with logistic growth for host, symbiont and collective, and for its results that the faster-evolving partner becomes obligate first and that the other’s fate turns on births and deaths inside the collective (THEORY-1051). Read it knowing that its headline result, dependence evolving ahead of cohesion, is fixed by the authors’ choice of how traits enter free growth and dissociation and reverses under the opposite choice in their own appendix (THEORY-1050); that nothing is tested against data, as the authors say; and that obligacy is a phenomenological trade-off, not gene loss. |
| LIT-1642 v2 | Spatial Localization in Dissipative Systems | Knobloch (2015). In systems where a homogeneous and a patterned state coexist, fronts between them can pin to the pattern’s phase, giving stable localized patches of pattern in a homogeneous background; as a parameter varies they grow by adding cells along a snaking bifurcation diagram (homoclinic snaking), shown in the Swift–Hohenberg equation and in fluid, optical and other experiments. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-27 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed (ADR-053). Unpaywall lists the publisher’s free copy at Annual Reviews, annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031214-014514; it answered curl with an HTTP 403 Cloudflare challenge, and a headless- browser fetch was not attempted, since it would be working around the challenge. The failure is on access, not availability. A browser fetch of the Annual Reviews copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1648 v2 | Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information | Simondon (1958; English 2020). Individuation is to be explained before individuals: from a metastable preindividual field charged with potentials, an individual forms by transduction, a structuring that propagates step by step, each structured region the condition for the next, as in crystallization. An individual is a partial resolution of the field and keeps a charge of preindividual reality, so individuation can continue. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the translation has no DOI to look up on Unpaywall, OpenAlex’s title search was out of its daily budget for this client, and the publisher sells it; no open copy is known. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Retried 2026-10-31 for the works Bencherki et al. 2024 lean on: no open edition on the University of Minnesota’s Manifold, no excerpt on the publisher’s page, nothing on the Internet Archive. |
| LIT-1656 v2 | Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living | Maturana & Varela (1980). A living system is an autopoietic machine: a network of processes producing the components that, through their interactions, regenerate the network and constitute it as a unity in space. Organization (the relations that define the unity) is distinguished from structure (the components realizing it), and cognition is identified with the process of living. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (Springer), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1680 | Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? | Blackiston, Silva Casey & Weiss (2008). Tobacco hornworm caterpillars (Manduca sexta) trained by pairing ethyl acetate with mild shock avoided the odour (78% of 41 fifth instars). Moths that had been trained as fifth instars still avoided it, four to five weeks and a metamorphosis later (77% of 27), and 80% of the tracked moths made the choice they had made as larvae. Odour alone, shock alone and backward pairing had no effect. Caterpillars trained at third instar kept the aversion through two larval molts but lost it as moths. Washing the pupae of trained larvae did not remove the adult aversion, and putting the odour on naive pupae did not create one, so chemical residue on the pupal case does not explain it. The authors suggest, by analogy with Drosophila, that the memory survives in mushroom-body neurons that form late in larval life and keep their projections through metamorphosis; they did not examine the brain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1249) from the publisher’s PDF (PLoS ONE, CC BY), checked against Europe PMC’s XML (PMC2248710); worth reading as the clean modern demonstration that a single conditioned aversion survives insect metamorphosis, with contamination controls and a timing dissociation that points to surviving neurons as the carrier; one odour, one lab and adult groups of 15 to 31. |
| LIT-1707 | The stability of memories during brain remodeling: A perspective | Blackiston, Shomrat & Levin (2015). A perspective gathering three animal systems in which learned behaviour is reported to survive drastic remodelling of the brain: metamorphosing insects, where odour-shock aversions learned by fly and moth larvae persist in adults; planaria, where McConnell’s 1960s work and the authors’ automated replication report memory surviving head regeneration; and hibernating ground squirrels and marmots, whose hippocampal dendrites are pruned in torpor and regrow on arousal. The authors argue that synaptic plasticity alone cannot explain lifelong memory, propose a “blueprint” kept by another mechanism, and suggest that in planaria memory may be stored outside the brain, possibly in neoblasts or in non-neural bioelectric networks, and imprinted on the regenerating brain. They set out a research programme to test it. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1258) from Europe PMC’s full-text XML (PMC4802789, CC BY-NC), cited by section; worth reading as the Levin lab’s map of the cases and its hypothesis that memory can live outside the brain; a programme, not evidence, which restates its own planarian result in one sentence. |
| LIT-1732 | An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planaria and its persistence through head regeneration | Shomrat & Levin (2013). With an automated training apparatus, planarian flatworms familiarized with a textured environment fed sooner in it. Worms whose heads were cut off regenerated new heads and, after a brief reminder session, showed the familiarity effect: a memory that outlasts the brain that formed it, perhaps stored elsewhere in the body. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; it is not in PMC. The publisher’s pages answered with a Cloudflare challenge, so whether the journal has since opened the article could not be checked, and the Levin lab’s publications page links only to the publisher. A copy on a course page was not used. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Levin and Shomrat’s 2013 post on The Node (LIT-1776). |
| LIT-1776 | Remembrance of Brains Past | A blog post by the authors of Shomrat and Levin 2013 announcing its result. Planarians trained to a chamber with a rough, laser-etched floor later recognised it, measured by their readiness to eat a piece of liver there rather than explore as naive worms do, and did so again after their heads were cut off and regrown, provided they had “a brief refresher” first. The training used an automated device that gives individual reward and punishment to 12 worms at a time, around the clock, scored by computer, built to answer the doubts about McConnell’s hand-run 1960s experiments. The authors conclude that memories “can be stored somewhere outside of the brain” and “imprinted on a naïve regenerated brain”, and suggest non-neural cells linked by gap junctions as the store. No numbers, methods or controls are given. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1283), in place of LIT-1732, which could not be reached; worth reading as the authors’ own plain statement of the planarian result and of how they read it, including the reminder it needed; too thin to stand for the paper’s data. |
| LIT-1781 | Retention of Learning through Metamorphosis in the Grain Beetle (Tenebrio molitor) | Alloway (1972). Mealworm larvae trained in a maze were reported to relearn it faster as adult beetles, and the paper reviews earlier claims of retention through insect metamorphosis and the difficulty of separating memory from carried-over chemical cues. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. One index marks it open access, but Oxford Academic answered with a Cloudflare challenge, so that could not be checked. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). |
| LIT-1861 | Can populations be healthy? Perspectives from Georges Canguilhem and Geoffrey Rose | Giroux (2021), HPLS 43:111. Canguilhem held that health and disease apply only to individuals taken as organic totalities, because normativity, the capacity to institute new norms, is anchored in the organism; at the population level he preferred “hygiene” or “salubrity”. Giroux argues that debates over units of selection and biological individuality loosen his link between individuality and organism, and that social epidemiology (Rose’s causes of incidence, integral variables such as herd immunity and social capital, multilevel models) gives reasons for a concept of population health not reducible to individual health, while denying populations the ontological unity of an organism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1452), from the published article in PubMed Central (PMC8527978; made available in the PMC Open Access Subset under Springer Nature’s COVID-19 terms), fetched as XML through the Europe PMC REST API. Worth reading for two things. It argues, from social epidemiology (Rose’s population causes, herd immunity, integral variables), that some health properties belong to populations and not to their members, against Canguilhem’s restriction of health to the individual organism. And it quotes Canguilhem’s definition of health as normativity in his own (translated) words: “the possibility of tolerating infractions of the habitual norm and instituting new norms in new situations” (The Normal and the Pathological, 1991, pp. 196–197). The Canguilhem it reports is at second hand. |
| LIT-1900 | L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité | Simondon (1989), the psychic and collective half of the 1958 thesis on individuation. As read here at second hand (LIT-1911, LIT-1901): information is the meaning that arises when an individuation resolves a disparity between two domains; affectivity and emotion mark a subject’s encounter with the pre-individual charge it has not exhausted, which it resolves by joining a collective, the transindividual. Unread. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read. The book is in copyright and sold by its publisher, and no lawful free copy is known. Open Library lists the 1989 and 2007 Aubier printings with no e-book. An Internet Archive search for creator Simondon found only other works (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, and a school text). OpenAlex was out of its daily budget for this client. Its second half is quoted at length, in translation, by Iliadis (LIT-1911) and by Bencherki (LIT-1901). The whole thesis is translated in LIT-1648, also Unavailable. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1901 | A pre-individual perspective to organizational action | Bencherki (2017), ephemera 17(4). After Simondon, action is pre-individual: logically prior to the people and organizations that appear to be its authors, it contributes to the individuation of both at once. Affect (“affectivo-emotivity”) is how a person discovers a pre-individual load that can only be resolved by continuing into a collective individuation; when that is refused, the result is felt as disindividuation. An action’s signification is its participation in an individuation, so one action can have several. Illustrated by a documentary on Canadian military spouses, read as co-individuation, channeling and usurpation of their action by the army. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1482), from the journal’s open-access PDF (ephemera, CC BY-NC-ND). Worth reading as the direct ancestor of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy’s “agency without agents” (LIT-1902): pre-individual action, affect, disindividuation, the continuation of personal into collective individuation, and coexisting significations are all here, seven years earlier. It is a conceptual proposal illustrated by excerpts from one documentary, not a test. |
| LIT-1902 | Agency Without Agents: Affective Forces, Communicative Events, and Organizational Becomings | Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024). A strong process theory of agency for organization studies. Agency is not an agent’s capacity to act but “the affective force, expressed as a communicative event, that governs the transition from one process of individuation to another”. It arises when one individuation process takes up another’s “excess action”, which may augment the ability to act of both and start a collective transindividuation. Failure is disindividuation. Communication is transduction, the continuity of action through processes, and meaning is retrospective. The illustration is a reanalysis of a meeting from Cooren’s ethnography of Médecins Sans Frontières. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1484), from the version of record the owner supplied. The publisher’s copy is open access (CC BY-NC 4.0) and a copy is deposited in R-libre (TÉLUQ). This client could not fetch either: SAGE and CORE served a bot check, and the repository reset every connection. Worth reading as the clearest statement in organization studies of agency without agents, built on Simondon’s individuation and Massumi’s affect. It is a conceptual proposal whose empirical illustration is a reanalysis, not a test. |
| LIT-1903 | The concept of transduction and its use in organization studies | Styhre (2010), Emergence: Complexity and Organization 12(3). Presents Simondon’s transduction “as a generalized model for the individuation of entities, that is, when heterogeneous resources are brought together and temporarily stabilized into functional units”, and uses it to examine Schatzki’s “site of the social” and Czarniawska’s “action nets”. Unread beyond the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read beyond the abstract. No lawful full text was reached. The journal’s own site (journal.emergentpublications.com) failed with a proxy 502 and its publisher, ISCE, closed in 2018; the Wayback Machine could not be reached from this client; Chalmers’ research portal (research.chalmers.se/en/publication/136251) holds metadata and the abstract only; the PhilArchive record STYTCO returned 403; CORE refused with 403; OpenAlex was out of its daily budget, and Crossref has no record of the article. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1908 | Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance | Manning (2012/2013), Duke University Press. A philosophy of individuation after Simondon, Whitehead and James, developed through movement, art practice and autistic perception: bodies are “always more than one”, never complete individuals, but phases of ongoing individuation in relation. Unread: registered from metadata and the standard citation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Duke’s copy (10.1215/9780822395829) and its De Gruyter and JSTOR copies are closed; OpenAlex reports no open location, and Project MUSE lists it as not open access. A “free download” page in web results was spam and was not used. |
| LIT-1911 | Informational Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation | Iliadis (2013), communication +1. Reads Simondon as “the first true philosopher of information” and places him as an extension of cybernetics rather than its opponent. Information, for Simondon, is not a signal passed along a channel but the resolution of a disparity between two domains in a metastable system; transduction is the operation that produces “a new informational structure, one that resolves a disparity between fields”. An exegesis built on quotations from L’individuation psychique et collective, with no argument that could fail. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1485), from the journal’s open-access PDF at openpublishing.library.umass.edu (CC BY-SA 4.0). A short exegesis, not an argument with tests: worth keeping as the source of the “informational ontology” reading of Simondon that Bencherki and Iliadis (LIT-1922) and Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) build on. |
| LIT-1915 | Simondon: investigating the pre-organizational | Letiche & Moriceau (2016; print 2017), the introduction to a Culture and Organization special issue on Simondon. Their abstract reads Simondon as “more a thinker of transindividuation than of individuation”, with transduction as an impersonal “life-force” of becoming of which “No one in particular is the subject”. It warns that transduction “would seem to escape the individual and/or collective will – becoming an all-important life-force outside political or ethical control”, and that Simondon’s ontology “needs to be debated”. Unread beyond the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read beyond the abstract. No lawful free full text was found: HAL’s record hal-01430560 is a notice with no file, and the IDEAS/RePEc entry says the item “is not available for download”; Moriceau’s page at jlmoriceau.wp.imt.fr/?p=56 links only to the publisher. The publisher’s page (tandfonline.com, doi 10.1080/14759551.2016.1240358) served a Cloudflare challenge, which was not passed, and Crossref records no open licence. OpenAlex was out of its daily budget for this client. The abstract, read in full from HAL’s API, holds the parent’s two p. 1 quotations. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1920 | Communication et information: Cours et conférences | Simondon (2010), posthumous courses and lectures on communication and information. Bencherki & Iliadis (LIT-1922) cite it for communication as “the process of information’s circulation through the very systems whose reordering it provokes”. Unread. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-31, not read. A posthumous collection of courses and lectures, in copyright and sold by its publisher; no lawful free copy is known. Open Library lists the 2010 Transparence edition with no e-book. An Internet Archive search for creator Simondon did not find it. OpenAlex was out of its daily budget for this client. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1922 | The Constitution of Organization as Informational Individuation | Bencherki & Iliadis (2019; print 2021), Communication Theory. Proposes Simondon’s informational individuation as the theory of communication that the communicative-constitution-of-organization (CCO) tradition lacks. Information is a differential in action potential between differently ordered domains; communication is its propagation “from kin to kin” (transduction), which organizes each domain it passes through; an action’s signification is the reordering it brings about; entities at different levels coexist rather than scale up. Four propositions, illustrated by one meeting excerpt. Agency is not theorized. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1483) from the authors’ manuscript in R-libre, TÉLUQ’s repository: 43 pp., Word-generated, headed “A more recent version of this paper is published in Communication Theory”. The version of record (Oxford, subscription) was not read, so its pagination (pp. 442–462) could not be checked against the text. Worth reading as the bridge between Iliadis’s exegesis of Simondon (LIT-1911) and the communicative constitution of organization; it is a theoretical proposal with one illustrative excerpt. |
| LIT-1927 | Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality by Endogenization of Scaffolded Properties | Bourrat (2022 online; 2025 in print), DOI-10.1086/719118. As Griesemer and Shavit report it (LIT-188, §2), a transition in individuality can start from ecological scaffolding that imposes Darwinian properties on collectives from outside, and it completes only when the collectives “endogenize” those properties, so that they survive release from the scaffold; otherwise the collective is “de-Darwinized”. Unread here. | Deferred — filed 2026-11-01, not read. Registered because Griesemer and Shavit (LIT-188, §2) build their “missing ingredient” on it. OpenAlex marks it open access (hybrid) at the publisher. No reading was attempted. |
| LIT-1932 | Development, Culture, and the Units of Inheritance | Griesemer (2000), DOI-10.1086/392831. Against developmental systems theory’s expanded replicator, an account of inheritance as reproduction with material overlap and development, which yields a new unit, the reproducer, in which genetic and developmental roles cannot be separated. From the abstract; unread. | Deferred — filed 2026-11-01, not read. Registered because Griesemer and Shavit’s account of community reproduction (LIT-188, §3) is this paper’s account of inheritance carried to social groups. OpenAlex reports it closed; a CiteSeerX record of a submitted version is listed there and was not tried. |
| LIT-1935 | Can models of evolutionary transition clarify the debates over the Neolithic Revolution? | Shavit & Sharon (2023), DOI-10.1098/rstb.2021.0413. Asks whether an evolutionary-transition-in-individuality perspective can clarify the disputed cause, tempo and role of intention in the Neolithic shift in the southern Levant; it offers “a fresh lens”, not a solution, stressing within- and between-group differences. From the abstract; unread. | Deferred — filed 2026-11-01, not read. The companion paper to LIT-188 in the same theme issue, and the source of its one worked illustration. Open access (CC BY) at PubMed Central as PMC9869441; no reading was attempted. |
| LIT-1937 | The Units of Evolutionary Transition | Griesemer (2000/2001), DOI-10.1556/Select.1.2000.1-3.7. Maynard Smith’s principle of multiplication is elaborated into a general account of reproduction integrating heredity and development at every level of the hierarchy; this yields the reproducer, generalizing the replicator, and a revised theory of evolutionary transitions with a three-stage scenario. From the abstract; unread. | Deferred — filed 2026-11-01, not read. Registered because it is the source of the reproducer-based account of transitions that Griesemer and Shavit (LIT-188, §2) lean on to treat demic groups as candidate higher-level reproducers. OpenAlex reports it closed. No reading was attempted. |
| LIT-1940 | Ecological scaffolding and the evolution of individuality | Black, Bourrat & Rainey (2020), DOI-10.1038/s41559-019-1086-9. A model in which an ecological scaffold, patchy resources with a regime of dispersal, imposes Darwinian properties on collectives of cells before any collective-level mechanism exists, so that selection can act on collectives from the start. Unread here; described from LIT-188 §2 and the record’s Bourrat readings. | Deferred — filed 2026-11-01, not read. Registered as the model Bourrat’s endogenization account and Griesemer and Shavit’s §2 (LIT-188) rest on. No reading was attempted. |
| LIT-2001 v2 | The Major Transitions in Evolution | Maynard Smith & Szathmáry (1995; OUP edition 1997), doi:10.1093/oso/9780198502944.001.0001. Registered unread from the owner’s synthesis of 2026-11-04, which names it as the origin of major evolutionary transitions theory and that theory as the bridge between coexistence, endosymbiosis, game theory and morality. The record has held the theory only through Okasha’s reading of it (LIT-749, NOTE-586). | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-04 for a lawful full text, and none was found, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex (no email address sent, ADR-008) reports the book closed, with no repository holding a full text. Its only location is Oxford Academic, which is paywalled. The companion Nature article (Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1995, doi:10.1038/374227a0) is closed as well. A copy the owner supplies returns it to reading. |
| LIT-2003 v2 | Major evolutionary transitions in individuality | West, Fisher, Gardner & Kiers (2015), doi:10.1073/pnas.1421402112. A transition in individuality is defined by mutual dependence and negligible within-group conflict, which Table 1 shows occur apart. It proceeds by forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with no clear border between the steps. An ecological benefit together with how groups form explains the transitions; kin discrimination and repression of competition played minor roles. Source of THEORY-1351, read in NOTE-1538. | Active |