individuation.
74 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-027 | Adding causality to individuality | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-038 v2 | Structural Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-064 v2 | Bourrat 2023, a coarse-graining account of individuality | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-100 v2 | Bourrat — Reproducees, reproducers, Darwinian individuals | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-114 v2 | SEP — Biological individuals | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-115 v2 | Meincke — A process view of pregnancy | 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”). | Read |
| NOTE-119 v2 | Evangelion and the desperate search for meaning | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-127 v2 | Holik et al. — Quasi-set theory for a quantum ontology | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-130 v2 | Floridi — The Informational Nature of Personal Identity | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-133 v2 | Leitgeb & Ladyman — Criteria of identity and structuralism | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-138 v2 | Goldstein & Lederman — What Does ChatGPT Want? | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-141 v2 | Corfield — Duality as a category-theoretic concept | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-148 v2 | Baedke — The Organism (Cambridge Element) | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-149 v2 | Chakravartty — Ontological Priority and non-eliminative OSR | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-152 v2 | Le Bihan & Read — Duality and ontology | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-159 v2 | SEP — Philosophy of 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. | Read |
| NOTE-166 v2 | Personal Identity and Ethics (SEP) | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-173 v3 | Griesemer & Shavit — Scaffolding individuality (3Cs) | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-178 v2 | De Haro & Butterfield — Philosophy and Physics of Duality | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-180 v4 | Clark & Chalmers — The Extended Mind | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-183 v2 | Birch — AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-184 v2 | SEP — Units and levels of selection | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-192 | Science, Metaphysics and Structural Realism | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-195 | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-264 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-268 | Identification and Identity | 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). | Read |
| NOTE-338 | Where Am I? | A first-person story with an argument inside. With his brain in a vat in Houston radio-linked to his body under Tulsa, the narrator tests three answers to “where am I?”: where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is. He favours the third and finds it unclear. A computer duplicate of his brain can take over his body with no detectable difference, and when duplicate and brain drift out of step there are two persons in one body. Intuition pumps, no thesis defended to the end. | Read |
| NOTE-341 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self” | A hypothesis essay. A Self is the set of parts that pursue goals together, and its boundary is the farthest region of space and time it can measure and act on, its “cognitive light cone”. Selves grow from homeostatic loops by adding memory, anticipation and networks, and cells form larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions. Every level that has its own goal is a Self, so living systems hold many nested Selves at once; the paper says this against IIT in one bracket. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data, and it confines claims about experience to a closing speculation. | Read |
| NOTE-348 | The Emotion Machine | Read in the 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think: each emotional state is a selection of mental resources turned on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem, and ordinary thinking uses the same switching. On this design sit six levels of mental activity, panalogies that link descriptions across realms, and a Self that is a network of partial models. It is argued by example and analogy, with no experiment and few neural claims. Against Damasio, the body is a resource the brain exploits, not what an emotion is made of; on Elliot it proposes, without evidence, the reverse causal direction. | Read |
| NOTE-363 | Clark — Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind | Clark defends LIT-097 against Adams and Aizawa’s intrinsic-content objection: the notion is unclear, silicon could carry it, and their own concession that not every cognitive state needs non-derived content lets a conventional encoding serve as a belief’s vehicle. Against the active-memory objection, he concedes the notebook is static and argues that how and when memory is updated is a difference below the level that matters. He closes on brains as open-ended controllers and persons as forensic, not biological, items. | Read |
| NOTE-364 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation, and like a fictional character it is indeterminate beyond what its story fixes. A mindless novel-writing robot can author a self whose story is true of the robot. Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography, and when the story coheres around two points there are two selves. The essay argues by analogy and thought experiment. Its evolutionary account of self-talk is speculation, and its evidence is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-370 | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds — Role play with large language models (read for the self) | Read for the self. The simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency, “not even simulated versions”; simulacra only role-play characters that have them, so when an agent says “I” there is “no-one at home”. The paper names, and does not answer, the question of which self a dialogue agent would act to preserve: hardware, process or instance. The denial of a self follows from the framing; no argument rules out a conscious actor behind the roles. | Read |
| NOTE-373 | Survival and Identity | What matters in survival is the R-relation (mental continuity and connectedness among person-stages), and it is also identity, because persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages and so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission and fusion become persons sharing stages, counted by tensed identity; the long-lived Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping persons; degrees come from supervaluation over cut-offs. Against Perry’s lifetimes, two persons, not three, take part in a fission. | Read |
| NOTE-374 | Personal Identity | A survey of the persistence debate with an animalist’s emphasis. It separates seven questions, argues that the persistence question concerns numerical identity and must not presuppose person essentialism, and sets out psychological-continuity, brute-physical and anticriterialist answers. Fission and the too-many-thinkers objection are the two arguments that do the work. It avoids the word “self”. One in-text citation (Olson and Witt 2020) has no matching bibliography entry. | Read |
| NOTE-376 | Shanahan — Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | An avowedly “poetic” attempt to fit consciousness and selfhood to a disembodied 2024 chat agent. Its time would be discrete and discontinuous. Its “I” can be the model or a conversation-bound self that flickers into being each turn; we may slip between them. Such selves can be copied, edited and merged, and spread over branching simulacra. No candidate site survives scrutiny, which is read as Buddhist emptiness and applied back to human selves. Examples are invented usages, not data. | Read |
| NOTE-378 | Personal Identity | Wiggins’s division case shows that what matters in survival need not be one-one, so it is not identity; fusion and imagined beings that divide show it comes in degrees. Q-memory and q-intention describe the relations without presupposing identity. Continuity (transitive) is distinguished from connectedness (degree), and successive selves are proposed in place of one underlying person. The principle of self-interest then has no independent force. §I is argued; the priority of connectedness is asserted; §VI is a sketch. | Read |
| NOTE-385 | Of Identity and Diversity | Identity is relative to the idea the name stands for: same mass, same life (oak, horse, man), same consciousness (person). A person is a thinking being that “can consider itself as itself”, and personal identity reaches as far back as consciousness can be extended, independent of substance. Man and person come apart (prince and cobbler; day-man and night-man), and “person” is “a forensic term” grounding reward and punishment. Argued from cases and intuitions; “the same consciousness” is never defined. | Read |
| NOTE-386 | Of Personal Identity | No impression of a self is constant, so there is no idea of one; introspection finds only perceptions, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Its ascribed identity is a fiction of the imagination, like that of ships, churches and plants, produced by resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it; hard cases are “grammatical”. The Appendix confesses that two principles, the distinctness of perceptions and the imperceptibility of real connexions, leave the unity of the mind unexplained. | Read |
| NOTE-387 | The Self and the Future | A body-exchange experiment told twice. Third-personally, with selfish choices before and reactions after, it supports “changing bodies”. First-personally, as torture preceded by amnesia, character change and implanted memories, fear remains rational at every step, and the step that completes the exchange alters only what happens to someone else. Conceptual undecidability and conventional decision leave the subject unable to expect anything. A “rather shaky” lean toward the bodily answer, as a risk. | Read |
| NOTE-389 | Ritchie — Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups | A structuralist framework for social groups. A social structure is a network of relations constitutively dependent on social factors; it can be overt or covert, intentionally or unintentionally created and instantiated, internal or external to what realizes it. Organized social groups are structured wholes whose internal social structures people occupy; feature social groups are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, which can be intersectional. A restriction to structures that intuitively exist or figure in explanations keeps arbitrary collections out. Motivated, not proved; nothing on agency or minds. | Read |
| NOTE-390 | Ritchie — What are groups? | Six criteria for any theory of groups (members vary across times and worlds; groups are temporary, contingent and located; coincident groups of one kind can be distinct) rule out groups as non-singular pluralities, fusions, Burge aggregates and Effingham’s sets. Proposed: a group is a realization of a structure whose nodes are defined by functional relations; it exists while every node is occupied, members are the occupiers, and two groups are identical at a time only with the same members in the same relations. A sketch of a view, silent on agency. | Read |
| NOTE-416 | Statistical Physics of Adaptation | A macrostate fluctuation relation for driven systems, rearranged as an internal-entropy term, a reversal term and Ψ − Φ = −ln⟨e^{−βΔQ}⟩. It is read as a tendency of driven matter towards states formed by reliable work absorption and dissipation, “adaptation” without replication. The relation is exact. The tendency needs the other two terms held fixed, which the paper arranges only in contrived one-particle landscapes; the many-body claim and the “adaptive resonance” simulation are argued and reported, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-419 | Statistical physics of self-replication | A coarse-grained second law, β⟨ΔQ⟩ + ln π(II→I) + ΔS_int ≥ 0, applied to self-replication: the heat a replicator releases per copy is bounded below by the log-odds against its copy falling apart within one generation, so durable, fast copies cost more heat. The general bound is sound. The E. coli and RNA numbers rest on an upper bound on the reverse probability that is argued from biology, not derived, and one printed logarithm has its argument inverted. | Read |
| NOTE-421 | Life as we know it | The flow of internal and active states in an ergodic system with a Markov blanket, written in Helmholtz form, can be redescribed as gradient descent on a variational free energy once the variational density is set equal to the posterior over external states. On that redescription such systems “appear” to infer and to bound their own entropy, which the paper calls the marks of life. One simulated soup shows a blanket-enclosed cluster that predicts external motion and falls apart under lesions. The free energy is variational, not thermodynamic. The candle flame is excluded by a one-sentence assertion. The paper’s own reported p-value is not reproduced by the null it describes. | Read |
| NOTE-447 | The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets | Pearl blankets (conditional-independence shields in a Bayesian network) and Friston blankets (agent–environment boundaries in the world) are different constructs conflated in the free-energy literature. The four-way partition needs a chosen internal node, sensorimotor labels and steady state; in Friston’s soup it also needs electrochemical-only coupling and a fixed cluster size. Realist use needs metaphysical premises; instrumental use is innocent but settles nothing about boundaries. | Read |
| NOTE-450 | The Markov blanket trick: On the scope of the free energy principle and active inference | The FEP is true of things defined its way, but its scope is limited: a Markov blanket fits only some things, is placed where the model needs it, and cannot represent relational properties or a boundary the system makes. Its real job is to give any system the partition variational Bayes requires. Active-inference models smuggle perception and action into hand-built generative models. A conceptual critique; no new formal result and no data. | Read |
| NOTE-458 | Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action | Minimal agency needs a self-individuated system that is the source of modulations of its coupling with the environment and regulates them by norms it generates. An autonomous organization, a precarious network of mutually enabling processes, generates all three when it adaptively modulates its coupling for its own maintenance. Life is sufficient, not necessary. The definition is a proposal: the authors say asymmetry’s formalization is incomplete and modeller-relative. | Read |
| NOTE-468 | Biological organisation as closure of constraints | A constraint acts on a process while being conserved at that process’s time scale; closure is a set of constraints, each directly dependent on and generative for another, that cannot be split. This separates closure from cycles of processes, grounds functions, and gives a boundary criterion, refined by a preliminary count-based tendency to closure for symbionts and by nested separated closures for levels. Applied only to schematic examples; closure is not claimed to define organisms. | Read |
| NOTE-555 | Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals | A mini-review arguing that corals must be studied as holobionts. The holobiont is defined by location (coral plus microbiota in body, mucus and skeleton), and its membership can change. Traits belong to host–symbiont combinations: a novel anemone–alga pairing out-performed both natural ones in oxygen flux at 32–34 °C, and two octocorals lost symbionts by different routes, one per host cell and one with host cells. It asks, without answering, whether the holobiont is the unit of selection. | Read |
| NOTE-556 | Defining Coral Bleaching as a Microbial Dysbiosis within the Coral Holobiont | A review that redefines bleaching as three holobiont dysbiosis stages: microbial buffering, Symbiodiniaceae reorganisation by shuffling or switching, and traumatic dysbiosis ending in death (Figure 3). The supporting material is cited and correlational. Vibrio rose from about 0 to 30% relative abundance in bleached corals and returned in resilient ones, but the authors say cause and consequence cannot be separated. “Dysbiosis” names both the disruption and the healthy adaptive response, and the stages have no operational boundaries. | Read |
| NOTE-562 | Cancer across the tree of life: cooperation and cheating in multicellularity | A review framing cancer as cheating on five foundations of multicellular cooperation and surveying cancer-like phenomena across the independent origins of complex multicellularity. Division-of-labour cheating appears in every form, resource and environment cheating only in animals and plants so far. Complex multicellularity is read as a cheater detection and suppression system, with proliferative units as a possible intermediate level of selection. | Read |
| NOTE-586 | The Major Transitions in Evolution—A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective | A philosopher’s overview of the major evolutionary transitions. It defines a transition as the evolution of a higher-level unit from formerly free-living ones, doubts that transitions are inevitable or that one theory explains them at the right grain, treats genic and hierarchical approaches as compatible, and argues that the transitions make the hierarchy an explanandum and the highest occupied level the privileged level of organisms. | Read |
| NOTE-695 | Esfeld & Lam — Moderate structural realism about space-time | Moderate structural realism keeps the first premise of the “master argument” for intrinsic properties, that relations require relata. It denies the second, that relata must have intrinsic properties over and above their relations. Objects and relations are mutually dependent, and relations supply identity conditions wherever intrinsic properties would. Where neither can, as with entangled quantum systems of one kind and space-time points in symmetric space-times, the paper takes numerical distinctness as primitive. It insists this is not a primitive thisness, and that this is why objects and relations stand on the same footing (pp. 33–34). In GR the relata are space-time points, not bare manifold points. The metric, or in the fibre-bundle formulation a section of the orthonormal frame bundle, gives them a “structural identity”. The hole argument tells against epistemic structural realism, and the question “what does a space-time relation relate?” tells against the radical form. The case is interpretive. It shows fit, not entailment, and the one concrete construction of structural identity it cites works only for space-times without symmetries. | Read |
| NOTE-720 v2 | Weber & Varela — Life after Kant | An argument, not a model: Kant’s natural purposes (§§ 64–65), Jonas’s metabolism and Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis converge on an intrinsic teleology, in which a self-producing system’s maintenance of its own identity is its purpose and the source of value for it. The boundary is in the definition (components “constitute the system as a distinguishable unity”), but no test tells a produced boundary from an imposed one, and a multicellular organism is said not to be autopoietic itself. Value is “objective” only relative to the organism, though one passage reaches a right to life. | Read |
| NOTE-721 | Smith & Varzi — Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries | Spatial boundaries are bona fide where there is a physical discontinuity or qualitative heterogeneity, and fiat where there is not and the boundary owes its existence to demarcation by cognition, language, law or mathematics. Bona fide boundaries get ordinary (Bolzanian) topology, in which a boundary belongs to one side only; fiat boundaries get a Brentanian theory, in which each side has its own and the two coincide. The distinction is about whether a discontinuity is there, not about who made it, so it does not map onto CLAIM-194’s produced/imposed. | Read |
| NOTE-722 | Lewis — Many, but almost one | Lewis gives two solutions to Unger’s problem of the many and combines them. Supervaluation: “cat” is undecided among the candidates, each precisification picks one, so “there is one cat” is super-true. Almost identity: the candidates are cats, but they overlap almost completely, and counting by that overlap gives one, true enough in most contexts. Almost-identity is overlap, not similarity. It is not transitive, its threshold is left undecided, and it fails when the candidates differ substantially. Supervaluation then does the work. | Read |
| NOTE-727 | Rubin, Roli, Stano & Damiano — Genealogies of organizational closure | A conceptual genealogy of the notions of closure (closure to information, cyclic, operational, semantic, catalytic, metabolic, closure to efficient causation, closure of constraints) from mathematical logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition. Its thesis is that closure is best read as a circular organization of efficient causes by which a living system produces the conditions of its own existence. That is not feedback, self-organization or a catalytic cycle, and it cannot be exhaustively characterized as a state-determined syntactic procedure. Current AI, agentic LLM systems included, is said to approximate closure without instantiating it. The genealogy is historical; the non-computability and AI verdicts are asserted or argued from Rosen, not demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-730 | Barandiaran — Organizational Accounts of Malfunction | The dual-order organizational account of malfunction (Saborido, Moreno and Mossio), on which a trait malfunctions when it meets first-order constitutive norms but fails a second-order regulatory shift between regimes, is too narrow and unnecessarily complicated. Barandiaran replaces it with a normative field over the viability space: at each precarious state, the minimum constant parametric change that avoids disintegration. A trait functions when its operation correlates positively with that field, subfunctions when it does so too slowly, malfunctions when it does not, and is nonfunctional when it does nothing where it must. Regulatory traits can malfunction by the same standard. Conceptual, with a one-variable toy model. | Read |
| NOTE-756 | Varley — Flickering Emergences | Information-theoretic emergence measures built on past–future mutual information are expected values, and their local (pointwise) values can be negative. In a four-node Boolean toy, a coarse-graining that is emergent on average maps about 53% of informative micro transitions to misinformative macro ones, and the whole-to-whole synergy atom is negative for 31.25% of macro transitions. In a connectome, misinformative edges fall mostly between communities. The paper argues the possibility is general to any excess-entropy measure; it shows instances, not a theorem. | Read |
| NOTE-773 | Tissot et al. — An ability to respond begins with inner alignment | In a simulated modular coordination game (30 modules of 10 bistable units, strong couplings inside modules, weak across), units that adjust only the phase of their decision cycle toward partners they currently agree with come to synchronise within modules. Each module then switches its convention as one unit in response to the others, and all 50 runs with the learned phases reach a global optimum, against none without. Global synchrony does not do this. Synchrony works by silencing the module’s internal pull at a shared moment, not by any signal passed inside it. | Read |
| NOTE-1211 | Athreya, Czuppon & Gokhale — The evolution of dependence and cohesion in incipient endosymbioses | An adaptive-dynamics model in which hosts, symbionts and host–symbiont collectives are three populations. Each partner has an “obligacy” (investment in collective rather than free-living growth) and an “adhesion” (investment in synchronized, collective reproduction). The faster-growing partner, the symbiont, becomes fully obligate first. What the host’s obligacy then does depends on within-collective births and deaths: it stays, rises to full dependence, or falls to none. Obligacy rises only if the collective’s carrying capacity is high enough; collective growth rate does not matter. Early on, dependence evolves ahead of cohesion. That last result holds for the trait mapping the authors chose, and their own Table S1 reverses it under the opposite mapping. The authors say the available data can neither confirm nor refute it. | Read |
| NOTE-1249 | Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? | Tobacco hornworm caterpillars trained to pair ethyl acetate with mild shock avoided it as fifth instars (78%, N = 41) and, four to five weeks and a metamorphosis later, as moths (77%, N = 27); 80% of tracked individuals chose the same way at both stages. Controls showed no effect. Washing trained pupae or scenting naive ones changed nothing, so residue on the pupal case does not explain the adult aversion. Third-instar training survived two larval molts but not metamorphosis. By analogy with Drosophila the authors place the memory in late-forming mushroom-body neurons that keep their projections through pupation, a hypothesis they did not test. | Read |
| NOTE-1258 | The stability of memories during brain remodeling: A perspective | A perspective, typed an addendum, with no new data. Learned behaviour is reported to survive brain remodelling in metamorphosing insects (odour-shock aversions in Drosophila and Manduca), regenerating planaria (McConnell’s 1960s savings and the authors’ 2013 place learning) and hibernating squirrels and marmots (hippocampal dendrites pruned in torpor, operant memory kept after six months). The authors argue that synaptic plasticity alone cannot explain lasting memory, posit a non-synaptic “blueprint”, and propose that a planarian’s memory may be stored outside the brain and imprinted on the new one, perhaps through neoblasts or bioelectric networks. The insect mechanism is called unknown; the planarian one untested. | Read |
| NOTE-1283 | Remembrance of Brains Past | The authors of Shomrat and Levin 2013 announce its result on a community blog. Planarians trained to a laser-etched chamber recognised it, by eating liver there sooner than naive worms, and recognised it again after head removal and regeneration, given a brief refresher. An automated device trained 12 worms at a time, around the clock, scored by computer, to meet the objections to McConnell’s hand-run work. The authors infer that memory can be stored outside the brain and imprinted on a new one, and suggest bioelectric networks of non-neural cells as the store. No numbers or controls are reported. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1373 | Marquis and Tilcsik — Imprinting: toward a multilevel theory | A review that defines imprinting by three features, a brief sensitive period, the stamp of the environment during it, and persistence despite later environmental change, and separates it from path dependence and cohort effects. It orders the literature in a 4 × 3 table (collectives, organizations, building blocks, individuals; economic and technological, institutional and individual sources) and proposes that entities carry layered imprints from several sensitive periods, including imprints taken secondhand from entities they copy. | Read |
| NOTE-1389 | Gioia, Schultz and Corley — Organizational identity, image, and adaptive instability | Gioia, Schultz and Corley argue that organizational identity, usually defined as central, distinctive and enduring, is better seen as fluid: members compare who they think they are with how they think outsiders see them, and the discrepancy pushes them to change either identity or image, so identity shifts while its labels stay. They call the result adaptive instability and argue that it helps organizations change. A conceptual paper with illustrations (Shell’s Brent Spar, IBM, Oticon, British Airways) and no data. | Read |
| NOTE-1400 | Krakauer et al. — The information theory of individuality | Splits I(S_n, E_n; S_{n+1}) two ways, into A* = I(S_{n+1}; S_n) plus nC = I(S_{n+1}; E_n | S_n), or I(S_{n+1}; E_n) plus A = I(S_{n+1}; S_n | E_n), and in the 2020 version names A* organismal, A colonial and nC environmentally determined individuality, read through a partial information decomposition left unspecified. Both A* and A can only grow as variables move from environment to system, so they cannot by themselves find a boundary; the 2020 version says a size cost is needed and does not supply one. Illustrated on one two-unit system; no algorithm and no data. | Read |
| NOTE-1437 | Moreno & Mossio — Biological Autonomy, the Introduction | The Introduction alone. Moreno and Mossio state their programme: the organism, not natural selection, is biology’s central idea; its core is a closure of constraints, which they say fundamentally differs from the process loops and self-organisation of dissipative structures, and which grounds teleology, normativity and function. With regulation and agency, closure makes an autonomous system, an organism; ecosystems meet only closure. The arguments are announced for chapters 1–7, which this reading does not cover. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1452 | Giroux — Can populations be healthy? | Giroux argues against Canguilhem that health can be a property of populations. His restriction of health to the individual organism rests on normativity, which he locates in organic totalities, and on a Darwinism centred on individuals; both are weakened by later debates on units of selection and individuality. Social epidemiology supplies population-level comparisons, integral variables such as herd immunity, and Rose’s distinction between causes of cases and causes of incidence, which justify a population health that is relatively autonomous but less unified than an organism. The paper also quotes Canguilhem’s definition of health as the capacity to institute new norms. | Read |
| NOTE-1482 | Bencherki — A pre-individual perspective to organizational action | After Simondon, action is pre-individual: it is not an agent’s deed but a difference that contributes to the individuation of persons and organizations at once, and authorship is an outcome. Affect is how a person finds a pre-individual load that only a collective individuation can resolve, and its refusal is felt as disindividuation. An action’s signification is its participation in an individuation. The illustration, a documentary on military spouses, sorts the army’s treatment of the women’s actions into co-individuation, channeling and usurpation. | Read |
| NOTE-1483 | Bencherki & Iliadis — Organization as informational individuation | Proposes Simondon’s informational individuation as the theory of communication that CCO research lacks. Information is a differential of action potential between differently ordered domains; communication is its kin-to-kin propagation, which orders each domain it crosses; meaning is that reordering; organizations and members are coexisting informational levels, not stages. Four propositions and one meeting excerpt; no test, and agency is not theorized. | Read |
| NOTE-1484 | Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy — Agency without agents | A conceptual paper. Agency is redefined, after Massumi and Simondon, as the affective force that governs a transition between individuation processes toward an augmented ability to act. It is expressed in a communicative event in which one process takes up another’s excess action, and it may start a collective transindividuation. Agents are its effects, not its sources. It is illustrated by rereading one meeting from Cooren’s MSF ethnography. The paper gives a vocabulary for redescription, with no criterion that would let an observation count against it. | Read |
| NOTE-1485 | Iliadis — Informational ontology | An exegesis of Simondon as a philosopher of information who extends cybernetics. Information is the resolution of a disparity between two domains of a metastable system, not a signal in a channel; transduction produces “a new informational structure, one that resolves a disparity between fields”. Its evidence is quotation from L’individuation psychique et collective; it proposes, and does not test, an “individuative methodology” for communication research. | Read |
| NOTE-1538 | West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers — Major evolutionary transitions in individuality | A colloquium review, with no new data or model. A transition in individuality is defined by two conditions: mutual dependence, where parts can replicate only within the larger unit, and negligible within-group conflict. It proceeds in two steps, forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with borders that are not clear. Table 1 shows that each condition occurs without the other. Across transitions, what does the work is an ecological benefit together with how groups form, through clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy or vertical transmission of clonal symbionts. Kin discrimination and the repression of competition played “relatively minor roles”. | Read |