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).
3 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| TERM-063 v2 | agent, as an individual that is the active source of modulations of its coupling with its environment and regulates them against norms its own organization sets (Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde) | THEORY-071’s three conditions (LIT-566, read in NOTE-458) as a candidate definition of “agent” beside TERM-044. The owner at U11 of the exchange of 2026-10-20 asked for “(potentially competing) TERM entries”; A11’s worked example was this one (“This entry could have rivals: [TERM-044] once filed”), and A12 and A14 kept it. It rivals TERM-044 because the two give different verdicts on cases the record holds: the thermostat with its designers and a trained policy’s training process pass TERM-044 and fail here. Proposed: recorded, not adopted. THEORY-071’s own promotion test would settle it. | Proposed |
| TERM-068 v2 | closure, and which sense | The record uses “closure” in at least eight senses and no entry says which is meant. This term lists them so that a claim using the word says which, as TERM-045 does for “self”. Sense 1, informational closure, is defined in full: I(X⃗_t; Z_{t+1} | Z⃗_t) = 0, which for a stationary discrete process is one condition with Barnett and Seth’s dynamical independence and with causal closure (THEORY-820), and is no mark of a system. Asked for at A11 of the exchange of 2026-10-20 (“That single disambiguation entry could save substantial rediscovery”), and at A12, A13 and A14, on the owner’s U11 and U13. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It adopts no definition the record does not already hold. | Active |
| TERM-070 v2 | organizational closure, as closure of constraints: a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and has another depending on it (Montévil and Mossio 2015), distinct from informational closure and from a flame’s maintenance of the conditions of its own combustion | Montévil and Mossio’s definition (LIT-582, read in NOTE-468), as CLAIM-395 states it. CLAIM-395 (Active, demonstrated) is stated in it without a TERM to use, and THEORY-072’s demarcation of organisms and THEORY-071’s “autonomy” turn on it. Asked for at A10, A11, A12, A13 and A14 of the exchange of 2026-10-20, with A12’s condition: “The definition must explicitly distinguish the proved structural constraints from the still-Proposed claim that the definition demarcates organisms.” Sense 6 of TERM-068. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. | Active |