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.
Philosophy of biology — what life, organisms and biological functions are — teleology and function, organisation and closure, biological individuality and autonomy, and the demarcation of the living (group: philosophy; ADR-025).
4 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-085 | Does a maintained r/place artwork feed back into the flow of repair that keeps it, so that it is self-maintaining like a candle flame, or is its defence supplied from outside like the heat under a convection cell, and does the answer change when its coalition starts switching strategies? | The question CLAIM-273 leaves open, set on the ladder the record’s readings already hold. An inert pattern needs no flow. A dissipative structure is held by a flow supplied from outside. A self-maintaining one, Bickhard’s and Mossio et al.’s candle flame, contributes to the flow that keeps it. A recursively self-maintaining one switches among ways of keeping itself going. An answer says which rung an artwork reaches, by a test that could fail on the placement and forum records. | Open |
| QUESTION-087 | Can an authority structure that reproduces itself be pathological by a standard grounded in the organization’s own organization, and not in goals assigned to it from outside? | A11’s Q2. The record has the phenomenon, protective lock-in (TERM-020): a regime that generates the conditions that justify its continuation. And it has a disclaimer: viability does not establish what ought to persist (CLAIM-075). It does not have the question of whether a standard intrinsic to the organization could tell entrenched authority from merited trust. Organizational accounts of malfunction are the nearest literature. | Open |
| QUESTION-128 | Does the record’s organizational account give a path to normativity from first principles: can norms of function and failure be defined from an organization’s own dynamics, and what more do practical and moral authority need? | The owner’s, U16 of the exchange of 2026-10-17: “does our account provide or perhaps at least allude to a path towards an account of normativity from first principles?” A16: “a plausible route from physical dynamics to system-relative norms of functioning and failure. It does not yet derive moral or rational authority from physical first principles.” The record holds the limit (CLAIM-075), the candidate readings (THEORY-071, THEORY-220, THEORY-628, THEORY-217) and a narrower question (QUESTION-087), but not the question. Filed in will-organization. Its cross-agent half is the authenticity line’s, whose blurb names “normativity across the scales an agent spans” and which was set aside on 2026-10-05; whether that line reopens is the owner’s decision, not made here. An answer is a model that defines function from the dynamics and tells it from mere contribution to persistence, and an account of what a standard needs beyond it. | Open |
| QUESTION-277 v5 | When formerly autonomous partners come to depend on one another, which of mutual dependence, reproductive cohesion, the distribution of essential functions across genomes, the host’s regulatory control and the alignment of selection does each route to dependence bring about, and which of them, alone or together, make the partnership a new evolutionary individual? | From the exchange of 2026-10-27 on the record’s coverage of reductive evolution and endosymbiosis. Dependence can come from selection for individual gene loss (LIT-1568), from drift in small symbiont populations (LIT-1573), from complementary loss across lineages (LIT-1565, LIT-1563) or from gene transfer and protein import (LIT-1557, LIT-1562). None of these is selection for the collective. Athreya et al. (LIT-1570) model dependence and cohesion as separate properties that evolve at different rates. An answer would say, route by route and on real systems, which properties each produces, and which of them a theory of individuality must require. All the works cited are filed unread. | Open |