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).
53 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-032 | The Yoneda lemma determines an object only up to isomorphism, from its whole hom-functor, among objects the category already has; as a formal version of “an object is determined by its relations” it presupposes the relata | nLab, Yoneda lemma (rev. 2026-08-17), LIT-221 — y is fully faithful and y(c) ≅ y(d) iff c ≅ d, and pointwise bijections of hom-sets without naturality do not suffice. Lam & Wüthrich (LIT-222) state two of its consequences without the name. The philosophical reading, a relational criterion of identity up to isomorphism rather than a construction of objects from relations, is the record’s own. It does not say that the lemma supports eliminating objects. | Active |
| THEORY-034 v3 | Chakravartty’s dilemma reaches only structural realisms that keep relata but deny them every intrinsic identity-fixing feature, and of the seven structural-realist texts read here against it, two are of that kind: Floridi’s informational structural realism and Esfeld and Lam’s moderate structural realism | Chakravartty (2012), LIT-196 — non-eliminative OSR must choose eliminativism or a role for intrinsic features in identity, and the no-priority variant fares no better. The placements of the record’s other OSR texts on that map are the record’s own synthesis, from NOTE-192, NOTE-095, NOTE-099, NOTE-189 and NOTE-142. The account does not say the dilemma is sound, and it does not say eliminative OSR survives; the chapter itself leaves eliminative OSR untouched. Whether the founding texts are of the target kind is QUESTION-336. | Active |
| THEORY-066 | A Markov-blanket partition is defined relative to a chosen internal set, so a graph has one around almost any set of nodes, and the formalism alone does not say which set is the system | The formal core of Bruineberg et al.’s critique (LIT-603, C4 in NOTE-447). In a directed acyclic graph the blanket of a node set A is its parents, children and the children’s other parents, and A is conditionally independent of everything outside A and its blanket. That holds for every A, so any set whose blanket leaves something outside gets a valid internal, blanket and external partition. Having a blanket therefore picks out no set. In Friston’s soup (LIT-526) the set was picked by spectral clustering with k = 8, not by the blanket. Active because it is a short derivation that anyone can check. It covers graphical (Pearl) blankets and the 2013 procedure. It does not cover the later sparse-coupling definitions at nonequilibrium steady state, which the record has not read. | Active |
| THEORY-071 v3 | Minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and self-generated normativity, and individuality without the other two is not agency | Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), LIT-566, read in NOTE-458. The three conditions are that the system distinguishes itself from its environment with no observer doing it, that it is the active source of modulations of its coupling with the environment, and that it regulates that coupling against norms its own organisation sets. Each is necessary, and together they are claimed to be sufficient. Individuality is the precondition of the other two and does not suffice. A cell in passive osmosis, a kitten warmed by its mother and a person with a Parkinsonian tremor are each individuals, and none of them is acting. The generative definition is an open autonomous organisation that adaptively modulates its coupling so as to maintain itself. Here “autonomy” and “self” mean organisational closure. They do not mean a subject or self-governance. Proposed: a conceptual analysis checked against intuitive cases, with an asymmetry criterion its authors call incomplete. | Proposed |
| THEORY-072 v4 | Organisms differ from dissipative structures such as a candle flame not by far-from-equilibrium self-maintenance, nor by circular self-maintenance alone, but by organisational differentiation: several distinct constraints that produce one another at different time scales | The record’s first answer to the demarcation question that NOTE-094 reports. Prigogine (LIT-516) supplies the dissipative structures, and nothing in his account separates them from organisms. Mossio, Saborido & Moreno (2009, LIT-570) grant a candle flame organisational closure. Its one macroscopic pattern keeps up the conditions of the combustion that makes it. They draw the line at organisational differentiation: in an organism several distinct structures make distinct contributions, where a flame makes “a unique contribution”. Montévil & Mossio (2015, LIT-582) narrow closure to mutual dependence among constraints. Each constraint must be both produced by and productive of another, with at least one slow and one fast dependence. On the record’s reading, that builds differentiation into closure, as Mossio and Bich (2014) already say of closure of constraints. No paper analyses a flame under the 2015 definitions. Neither paper says closure defines an organism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-073 v2 | In Friston’s 2013 formulation and the applications the record holds, a Markov blanket does not individuate a system: where it falls is fixed by modelling choices made before it is traced (the coupling graph, the internal set and the time at which steady state is assumed), and a blanket read from a fixed graph is the same whether the system produced the boundary or it was imposed | Bruineberg et al. (LIT-603) and Raja et al. (LIT-598) argue, by different routes, that the Markov blanket of the free-energy literature is placed and not found. The formal core is THEORY-066: the partition takes the internal set as input. This account adds what the critiques show about practice. In Friston’s soup (LIT-526) the graph was built from one kind of coupling and steady state was assumed when the run stopped. In published applications the blanket sits wherever the model needs it: in the receptors of a brain, the membrane of a bacillus, the beam joining two pendulums. The formalism also gives the same description to a membrane the cell makes and a beam nobody’s states make. So the blanket presupposes the boundary it is offered as the criterion of. Active since 2026-10-27, narrowed to the 2013 formulation and the applications held. The later steady-state definitions have not been read, and the unrestricted claim is THEORY-1097, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-135 v2 | Multicellular cooperation depends on suppressing cells that gain fitness at the expense of the organism, across five foundations (proliferation inhibition, controlled cell death, division of labour, resource allocation and maintenance of the extracellular environment); cancer-like cheating on them is found across the independent origins of complex multicellularity, so complex multicellularity can be understood as a system for detecting and suppressing cheaters | Aktipis et al. (2015), LIT-740. Multicellularity requires cell-level fitness to be suppressed; cancer is cheating on five foundations of cellular cooperation. A survey of the independent origins of complex multicellularity finds cancer-like cheating widely, division-of-labour cheating in every form. Proposed: a literature review whose survey is limited by what has been studied, with no model or new data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-141 v2 | In a major evolutionary transition, where formerly free-living units come to form a higher-level unit, the collective is stable only if selection between collectives comes to trump selection among the units within them, typically through mechanisms such as policing, kinship and division of labour that align the interests of the units; the levels at which selection acts are then a product of evolution, to be explained rather than assumed | Okasha (2022), LIT-749, restating with Buss and Michod a principle of the major transitions: a new collective can be undone by defectors, and succeeds only if higher-level selection trumps lower-level selection, usually through policing or aligned interests. The transitions make the hierarchy an explanandum. Proposed: a review stating general principles that Okasha himself says may explain any one transition only coarsely. | Proposed |
| THEORY-221 v2 | Organizational closure is a circular organization of efficient causes by which a system produces the conditions of its own existence, distinct from feedback, self-organization and catalytic cycles; systems whose loops do not regenerate the constraints that make them possible approximate closure without instantiating it | Rubin, Roli, Stano & Damiano (2026), LIT-1027, read in NOTE-727. A genealogy of closure notions from logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition, and an interpretive thesis drawn from it. The genealogy shows that “closure” names different things (information, operations, efficient causes, constraints, catalysts). The thesis picks efficient causes, adds that closure so read cannot be exhaustively described as a state-determined syntactic procedure, and concludes that current AI, agentic LLM systems included, is heteronomous. Proposed: the thesis is an interpretation, the irreducibility rests on Rosen’s unassessed arguments and a halting-problem argument the authors call provisional, and the AI verdict is drawn from the definition, not from analysis of any system. | Proposed |
| THEORY-249 | Whether a system has agency can be settled only relative to a reference frame: each of four conditions of agency (a boundary, being the source of action, meaningful goal-directedness and adaptivity) needs a commitment outside the system before it can be decided | Abel et al. (2025), LIT-969, read in full in NOTE-793. A four-page position paper, argued and not proved: each condition is shown two-valued under two plausible choices by citing an earlier result (Jiang; Kenton et al., LIT-909; inverse-RL underdetermination; Zadeh). The premises are existential and the conclusion universal, so what is supported is that some attributions of agency depend on the frame. That the choices are arbitrary is asserted, and the paper itself floats predictive power as a way to choose. | Proposed |
| THEORY-254 | Tangle-defined cohesion matches network communities only where community structure is strongly delineated, and tangles of one to three vertices recur beside the ones that do | Salter-Duke (2024), LIT-955, a PhD thesis read in full in NOTE-814. Edge-connectivity tangles, computed exactly at low order on eleven small real networks, give communities close to standard methods where structure is strong (yeast PPI) and none or almost none where it is weak (karate club, C. elegans, college football at the orders reached), and where tangles divide a network some hold only one to three vertices. The relation is read by eye from eight networks, and the vertex sets depend on the author’s assignment rule. | Proposed |
| THEORY-265 v2 | In Tissot et al.’s minimal model of bistable deciders in a modular coordination game (thirty modules of ten, couplings 1 within modules and 0.01 across), phase synchronisation within modules, driven only by each unit’s local payoff, makes each module respond to the others as a single unit, and synchrony matched to the modules is needed: global synchrony does not | Tissot, Levin, Buckley & Watson (2024), LIT-989, read in full (v1 and v2) in NOTE-773. In a simulated game of 30 modules of 10 units, each unit shifts the phase of its decision cycle toward partners it currently agrees with. Phases synchronise within modules, each module then switches as a block, and 50 of 50 runs with the learned phases reach a global optimum against 0 of 50 without; imposed global synchrony does not help. It is one clean game, one parameter setting, and a postulated phase rule; the modules are built in, and timing finds them rather than drawing them. Re-implemented by the sixteenth status review: learned phases, and module-matched phases imposed by hand, reach the optimum; random, shuffled and global phases do not make modules respond as units. The effect matters only where modules are isolated enough to lock in. | Active |
| THEORY-268 | An emergence measure averaged over a system’s transitions can be positive while its local value is negative at particular transitions, so emergence so measured belongs to the ensemble, not to each moment | Varley (2022), LIT-953, read in full in NOTE-756. Both the coarse-graining and the ΦID accounts of emergence score an expected past–future mutual information, whose pointwise values can be negative. In one constructed toy, about 53% of informative micro transitions map to misinformative macro ones, and the synergy atom is negative for 31.25% of transitions, while both averages are positive. The paper argues the possibility is general and shows it in instances; it does not show that every system flickers, or say what a negative moment means. | Proposed |
| THEORY-413 | ’Unit of selection’ names four separable roles, interactor, reproducer, manifestor of adaptation and beneficiary, and being an interactor at a level does not require engineering adaptations at that level, so showing that a level lacks them does not show it is not a unit of selection | Lloyd’s SEP entry (2005, revised 2024), LIT-160, read in NOTE-184. Her own programme, stated in the first person, and advocacy as well as a map. The four-question anatomy is the firm part. The diagnosis that conflating interactor and manifestor is “the most common error” is asserted, not counted. Its rulings on kin and group selection, the cheater problem and the Price equation are one school’s, not consensus. | Proposed |
| THEORY-417 | ’Personal identity’ names several largely independent questions, among them who one is (characterization), what a person is, what it takes for one to persist, how many of us there are and what matters in survival; the persistence question concerns numerical identity, which ‘remaining the same person’ in the characterization sense presupposes, and posing it as ‘a person at one time and a person at another’ assumes that we are persons essentially | Olson (2002; rev. 2023), LIT-454, read in NOTE-374. Seven questions: characterization, personhood, persistence, evidence, population, personal ontology and what matters. The distinctions are conceptual and the record holds them as stated. They do not say which answer to any of the questions is right; the entry’s own answer, animalism, is argued in other sections and is not part of this account. The self is set aside by the entry, so the map does not cover the self literature. | Active |
| THEORY-418 v3 | A collective becomes a new level of individuality, on this sketch, only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it and some core interactions have become generatively entrenched and, as the paper asserts without deriving it from entrenchment, it has organizational closure; such a community can then be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), LIT-188, read in NOTE-173. A conceptual sketch, so called by its authors, with no model, data or operational criteria. The paper’s two headline claims, that it describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity, appear only in the abstract and are not argued. Stage 3 is defined by a shared goal (§1), and §3 makes sustaining the community “a focal goal of every participating member”, which presupposes the group. The one argued conclusion, that inheritance at the new level evolves “in tandem”, is hedged and in tension with §2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-424 v2 | Mutual-information measures of individuality that read a system’s next state off its present one measure association, not propagation: I(S_{t+1}; S_t) can be positive when the environment alone drives the system, and conditioning on the environment does not recover the interventional quantity, which can be zero where the conditional measure is one bit | Bourrat (2024), LIT-005, read in NOTE-027, against Krakauer et al.’s (2020) measures. A* = I(S_{t+1}; S_t) is confounded when the environment is a common cause (his Fig. 2), and his interventional  = I(S_{t+1}; Ŝ_t) is zero there. His claim that  equals Krakauer’s conditional A = I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t) is false in general: NOTE-027’s XOR system has A = 1 bit and  = 0.  itself depends on an intervention distribution the paper leaves open, and neither it nor the paper’s two ETI criteria is computed on any system. | Active |
| THEORY-443 | Being a biological individual is not being an organism: evolutionary (Darwinian) individuality and physiological individuality come apart, and each is found among parts of organisms and groups of organisms as well as among organisms, so a part or a group can be an individual of one kind and not the other | Wilson and Barker (SEP, 2007; substantive revision 2024), LIT-168, read in NOTE-114. That organisms are not the only biological individuals is argued from examples; that evolutionary and physiological individuality is the most recognised distinction is a survey judgement. The nine-region framework that places each case is the authors’ own and tentative, and its figures draw as disjoint the categories the text says overlap. It offers no criterion of parthood and leaves holobionts open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-447 v2 | Granted that a person survives a brain transplant and that half a brain would do, each product of a division stands in all that matters in ordinary survival, so what matters is not identity, which is one-one and all-or-nothing, but psychological relations that can branch and come in degrees | Parfit (1971), LIT-447, read in NOTE-378, with the fission dilemma as Olson’s survey states it, LIT-454 (NOTE-374). The division argument is strong given its premises, and the premises are stated: brain-transplant survival is assumed, not argued. It does not say that connectedness matters more than continuity, which Parfit asserts for lack of space, or that a copy or a transcript is a survivor: the dependence q-memory needs is left “(whatever that is)”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-448 | On a substance ontology, a gestated foster that is part of the pregnant organism either is no substance, so that mammals begin at birth and the foster is not the later baby, or is part and substance at once, which leaves no consistent count; a process ontology keeps both parthood and foster–neonate identity, at the price of a count between one and two that it does not define | Meincke (2021), LIT-142, read in NOTE-115. The critique of the Parthood View under substance ontology holds on its own and is the paper’s firm contribution. The positive view rests on five process-biology premises assumed for the sake of argument, and is programmatic by the paper’s own word; “something in between one and two” has no formal content. It keeps parthood rather than rejecting it, and it draws no ethical conclusion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-452 | A thing with many equally good candidate boundaries can be counted as one in two ways that cover each other’s failures: supervaluation makes ‘there is one cat’ true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat, and counting by almost-identity, meaning extensive mereological overlap, makes it true enough where the candidates overlap almost completely | Lewis (1993), LIT-1015, read in full in NOTE-722. Two answers to Unger’s problem of the many, offered together. Supervaluation makes “there is one cat” super-true at the granted cost that nothing is super-truly the cat. Almost-identity, which is overlap and not similarity, makes the many candidates “almost one”. It is not transitive and its threshold is left undecided. Each covers a case the other fails: Fred’s house needs supervaluation, and supervaluation is natural only where the candidates differ little. It assumes semantic indecision, perdurance and no natural joint among the candidates. It has no metric, no dynamics and no threshold, so it is a precedent for counting by something weaker than identity, not evidence for any of the record’s claims. | Proposed |
| THEORY-453 | Basic physical objects can be nothing beyond the bearers of their relations: relations give them identity conditions wherever they discern them, and where nothing discerns them, as with entangled systems of one kind or points of a symmetric space-time, a primitive numerical diversity that is not a thisness suffices; general relativity’s tensor and fibre-bundle formulations fit this reading but do not require it | Esfeld & Lam (2008), LIT-895, read in full in NOTE-695. Moderate structural realism: relations require relata, but relata need no fundamental intrinsic properties, and objects and relations depend on each other with no priority. Its distinctive move is primitive numerical diversity, which it says gives no identity of any sort. The GR sections show interpretive fit, not entailment. Identity is equivocal between §1, where symmetric space-times need primitive diversity, and §2, where the metric “completely determines” structural identity; the one concrete construction cited works only without symmetries and breaks the general covariance the view rests on. The no-priority argument assumes three options are exhaustive. | Proposed |
| THEORY-465 | Being reproduced does not entail reproducing: genes of multicellular organisms, like hearts, are reproducees with little reproductive autonomy and differ from hearts in reproductive causal control, and material overlap between parent and offspring is required of reproducers, which are whole life cycles, but not of reproducees | Bourrat (2025), LIT-157, read in NOTE-100. A definitional framework with no model or data. Both measures are recipes and neither is computed. The proxy for autonomy (conditional mutual information) measures resemblance given the environment, not the range of backgrounds the definition names, and the two recipes given for it differ. The overlap claim rests on a premise shown only for retroviruses, and the conclusion’s “necessarily” outruns it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-476 | If continuant persons are maximal aggregates of person-stages interrelated by the psychological relation R, then the relation of belonging to one person is R itself, so Parfit’s premises do not show that identity is not what matters; the price is that persons overlap in fission and are counted by a relation weaker than identity | Lewis (1976), LIT-446, read in NOTE-373. Shown: that identity being one-one and all-or-nothing, and what matters branching and coming in degrees, do not entail that identity is not what matters, once stages and continuants are told apart; and that under supervaluation degrees of I-relatedness equal degrees of R-relatedness. Stipulated: that persons are the maximal R-interrelated aggregates. Conceded as costly: counting persons by tensed identity, which “is not a kind of identity”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-490 v2 | What a chat agent’s ‘I’ refers to is fixed by the context of use, not by the system: the agent role-plays characters that carry the self-conception the corpus and the conversation give them, and its uses of ‘I’ can pick out the model, present in many simultaneous instances, or the single conversation, none of them the self by nature | Shanahan (2025), LIT-466, read in NOTE-376, with Shanahan, McDonell and Reynolds (2023), LIT-460, read for the self in NOTE-370. The candidate sites of an LLM’s “I”, and the fact that a conversation-bound self is literally a transcript and a program, are solid. That both the model and the conversation are legitimate referents rests on two invented usages. It does not say that there is “no-one at home” or that no candidate is a self, which the papers assert without a criterion, and its subject is a 2024-vintage chat agent without tools or memory across conversations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-514 | Self-maintenance through closure of constraints does not single out organisms, since colonies, holobionts, symbioses and ecosystems meet it too, so a persister criterion applied at whatever level meets it turns organisms into parts; what is proposed to mark organisms is that they can also induce, control and come through phases of destabilised organisation and reach a new closure regime, though that only organisms can do so is asserted | Baedke (2025), LIT-167, read in full in NOTE-148. The negative half, that persister criteria are too permissive, is argued from the literature: closure has been applied to symbioses, ecosystems and eusocial colonies, and Mossio (2024) concedes that “organized systems are not necessarily organisms”. The positive half, the overcomer, is drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51) from three cases, two of which are lineage-level evolution or colony-triggered plasticity, and its uniqueness to organisms is asserted, with the one contrast (colony against ant) presupposing its verdict. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-531 v2 | Told in the third person, a transfer of memories and character between two bodies reads as the persons exchanging bodies; told in the first person, no predicted psychological change removes the subject’s reason to fear pain to his own body, and the step that completes the exchange happens only to the other man, so the two tellings support opposite criteria | Williams (1970), LIT-462, read in NOTE-387. The strongest step is shown given its premise: the last step of the series that turns amnesia into a body exchange changes nothing for the subject. The premise, that psychological change cannot remove the reason to fear pain, is argued from cases. Williams claims no criterion of identity, calls his resolution “rather shaky” and “risky”, and does not treat fission. | Proposed |
| THEORY-535 | Quantum systems read as bundles of property-instances with no principle of individuality can have their kinds and their number stated in quasi-set theory, so that N indistinguishable particles get a definite quasi-cardinal without labels; the construction covers kinds and counting only, not states, actualization or dynamics | Holik, Jorge, Krause & Lombardi (2021), LIT-107, read in full from the preprint in NOTE-127. The Lombardi–da Costa ontology of properties makes a quantum system a bundle of instances of universal type-properties, with no principle of individuality. Krause’s quasi-set theory Q, reinterpreted over property-instances, represents an atomic bundle as a qset taking one instance from each qset of indiscernibles, guaranteed by Q’s Axiom of Choice, and N particles as a subqset of quasi-cardinal N. The new formal content is about two pages (§6), the printed proofs contain errors, and states, actualization and dynamics are not formalized. The claims about Kochen–Specker and non-separability are recharacterizations by definition, not results. | Proposed |
| THEORY-546 v2 | A person persists by psychological continuity, not by sameness of substance or of the human animal; Locke’s sameness of consciousness, which he leaves undefined, meets the charges of circularity, intransitivity and gaps when recast as overlapping chains of causally dependent psychological states with quasi-memory, and fission then needs either a clause against branching or multiple occupancy | Locke (1694), LIT-464, read in NOTE-385, with the repairs as Olson’s survey (LIT-454, NOTE-374) and Parfit (LIT-447, NOTE-378) give them. Locke shows that same man, same substance and same person can be given different conditions; that the person’s are those of consciousness he asserts and illustrates. The repaired criterion is the majority view in the survey, and its author, an animalist, argues it implies two thinkers in every chair. It is a criterion of persistence, not an account of what matters or of what we are made of. | Proposed |
| THEORY-549 | A structured group is not identical to its members: two groups of one kind can have the same members at every time and still be two, which theories that identify a group with a plurality, fusion, aggregate or set of its members cannot allow, and a view of groups as realizations of structures with functionally defined nodes can | Ritchie (2013, online 2012), LIT-479, read in NOTE-390, with its 2018 sequel LIT-486 (NOTE-389). Six criteria for a theory of groups, each defended by one example, rule out non-singular pluralities, Sider’s fusions, Burge’s aggregates and Effingham’s sets; the decisive one is Coincidence. Groups as realized structures meet all six. The refutations are strong given the criteria; the criteria rest on single cases, and the positive view is a four-page sketch with no persistence conditions. It says nothing about agency or minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-575 | ’Social group’ names two kinds of thing: organized social groups, such as teams, courts and families, are structured wholes whose people occupy the nodes of an internal social structure, while feature social groups, such as women, racial groups and classes, are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, and are not concrete wholes | Ritchie (2020, online 2018), LIT-486, read in NOTE-389, building on her 2013 view (LIT-479). A social structure is one constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors. Organized groups realize internal structures; feature groups are positions in external ones, which can be intersectional. A framework offered to “motivate”, in the author’s word: accounts of gender are shown to fit it, not argued for against rivals, and the work of excluding arbitrary collections is done by a restriction the framework imports. Silent on agency; the record uses it to say which groups the agency questions are about. | Proposed |
| THEORY-579 v2 | If belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and a parity principle the authors state rather than argue | Clark & Chalmers (1998), LIT-097, read in NOTE-180, with Clark’s reply to the critics (2005), LIT-403, read in NOTE-363. Otto’s notebook plays for him the role Inga’s memory plays for her, so on role-functionalism it carries his standing belief, and Twin Otto, a duplicate from the skin in, believes otherwise. The constitutive step is carried by role-functionalism, the parity sentence and explanatory simplicity, none of them defended; the four coupling features mark a clear case and are explicitly not necessary and sufficient. Proposed: the step from causal coupling to parthood is the open point. The thesis is about vehicles of standing beliefs, not about consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-583 | An agent is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events it can sense and try to regulate; cells joined by bioelectric coupling share measurements and so form larger agents with larger goals without ceasing to be agents, so a living system is many nested agents, not one, and cancer is the larger agent shrinking back to the cell | Levin (2019), LIT-439, a hypothesis-and-theory essay read in full in NOTE-341. A definition of the Self as a goal-pursuing collective, tied to a mechanism, gap-junctional coupling, from cited experiments on patterning and cancer. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data. Its goals are cybernetic set points, so any homeostat is a Self. Its Self is an agent and an individual, not a subject. The sentence against IIT’s single Self is a bracket, and the closing remarks on experience are labelled speculation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-607 | The individuals that appear in an evolutionary transition in individuality are a summary description of lower-level processes, not a new level of fact: a partition of particles defines collectives when predicting at the coarse grain matches predicting at the fine grain across many traits, and collectives become indispensable, and so quasi-ontological, only because finite measurement and computation make the fine-grained prediction unaffordable | Bourrat (2023), LIT-049, read in full in NOTE-064. The formal criterion is accuracy only: δC = C_T − C_P < θ across many traits, conditioned on the environment where ecology could fake coherence. As written it is degenerate, since the identity partition gives δC = 0. The cost that is meant to stop that is argued separately, by a 100-operation toy, and never put into the criterion. Nothing is computed on any model. The abstract’s “cannot be dismissed as merely epistemic” is stronger than the body, which says one “pretend[s] as if” the level of selection changed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-622 | Spatial boundaries are bona fide where a spatial discontinuity or a heterogeneity of material is present and fiat where they exist only by demarcation; the two obey different topologies, distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any whole of separate bodies is a fiat object, and real properties of the material still enable and constrain where fiat boundaries can be drawn | Smith & Varzi (2000), LIT-1024, read in full in NOTE-721. A typology with a formal sketch: ordinary closure topology for bona fide boundaries, and a Brentanian theory of coinciding boundaries for fiat ones, which are parts of what they bound. The test is whether a discontinuity is there, not who or what made it. The theory is spatial, synchronic and pitched at the common-sense level; it has no models or consistency result, and the typology is stipulated by examples. It does not map onto the record’s produced/imposed distinction, and it classifies the record’s combined forms as fiat without choosing among them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-650 | Whether a self at one time is the same as a self at another has an answer only relative to a level of abstraction fixed by the purpose of asking, and asked at no such level it has none; the question with a substantive answer is what makes a self one thing at a time | Floridi (2011), LIT-136, read in NOTE-130. The deflation of diachronic identity is an informal argument from examples that rests on the method of levels of abstraction, assumed from elsewhere; that this “is not relativism” is one sentence, and that individuation comes before identification is asserted. It is not, as its title suggests, a criterion of personal identity, and its positive answer to the synchronic question, the three-membranes model, is “somewhat figurative” by its author’s word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-666 | A system that produces itself, a network of production that regenerates the components which produce it and constitute it as a distinguishable unity, has by that fact an intrinsic purpose, the maintenance of its identity, and with it a point of view, valence and a world as distinct from an environment, so that teleology in organisms is real and not an observer’s as-if; the account is stated for the cell, and a multicellular organism is not itself autopoietic | Weber & Varela (2002), LIT-1018, read in full in NOTE-720. An essay of exegesis and convergence: Kant’s natural purposes read non-reductively, Jonas’s metabolism-based philosophy of the organism, and autopoiesis. The step from self-production to purpose is asserted (“Bluntly stated”), the step to subjectivity is Jonas’s phenomenological inversion, and no observable is proposed for the “empirical feature” the conclusion claims. What sets autopoiesis apart from dissipative structures is placed in “concern”, not in organisation. One paragraph runs from self-maintenance to a right to life. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1050 v2 | In Athreya, Czuppon and Gokhale’s adaptive-dynamics model of an incipient endosymbiosis, mutual dependence (the product of the partners’ obligacies) evolves ahead of reproductive cohesion (the product of their adhesions) early on, but only under the mapping in which each partner’s free-living growth depends on its own obligacy alone while dissociation depends on both partners’ adhesions; the authors’ own appendix shows the bias vanishing under matched mappings and reversing under the opposite one, and their survey of real symbioses cannot test it | Athreya, Czuppon & Gokhale (2025), LIT-1570, read in NOTE-1211. In the exponential version of the model, all four traits rise monotonically. Each partner becomes more obligate than adhesive, because a gain in adhesion is “damped by the other adhesion” in the dissociation rate. Table S1 shows this is a consequence of that mapping: matched mappings give no bias, and the opposite mapping biases trajectories towards cohesion. The record’s summary of the result, “even when investments are uncorrelated”, is true of the traits’ genetic correlation but not of their functional coupling, which is what decides it. | Active |
| THEORY-1051 v2 | In Athreya, Czuppon and Gokhale’s model of an incipient endosymbiosis, the partner with the larger and faster-growing population evolves faster and becomes fully obligate first, which the authors read as a Red King effect in which the collective’s shared fate aligns interests; with equal within-collective rates for both partners, the other partner’s dependence then stays where it was, rises to full dependence, or falls to none, according to whether partners are born or die inside the collective; and in its simulations dependence rose from zero at the higher collective carrying capacities tried and not at the lowest, under a condition the authors show sufficient and not necessary, so a full transition to a mutually dependent, co-reproducing pair is a parameter-dependent outcome and not the default | Athreya, Czuppon & Gokhale (2025), LIT-1570, read in NOTE-1211. With the symbiont’s population larger and faster, its obligacy reaches 1 first. In the base model the host’s R₀ is then exactly 1, so host obligacy is neutral. With within-collective deaths the host goes fully obligate, and with within-collective births it goes back to independence. Obligacy rose from zero in simulations where the collective’s carrying capacity exceeded about aK_HK_S/d, a condition shown sufficient, not necessary; collective growth rate does not matter. The authors take the model as a null: a transition “is far from an inevitable outcome of the existence of a higher level of selection”. | Active |
| THEORY-1097 | A Markov blanket, in any formulation including sparse coupling at nonequilibrium steady state and time-varying blanket states, does not individuate a system: where it falls is fixed by modelling choices made before it is found, so it presupposes the boundary it is used to find, and it cannot represent a boundary the system produces | The wider claim dropped when THEORY-073 was narrowed to Friston’s 2013 formulation and promoted on 2026-10-27 (ADR-047 v4: a narrowing’s dropped claims go to Proposed entries). Both critiques argue the general form, and the record holds neither of the later formulations it would have to reach. Its promote_when is THEORY-073’s own, moved here unchanged. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1107 v2 | On Sørensen and colleagues’ scenario, an endosymbiont becomes an organelle in steps: the host first targets effector proteins into it; an imported host protein redundant with one of its functions then lets the endosymbiont’s own gene decay, making it dependent; and a general import pathway, once evolved, brings in hundreds of proteins; this genetic integration arises only in permanent, vertically transmitted associations, and host effector control without vertical transmission, as in rhizobia, does not lead to it | Sørensen, Stiller, Kröninger & Nowack (2025), LIT-1560, read in NOTE-1241. Their closing scenario orders the steps from endosymbiont to organelle: effectors first, then dependence through one redundant imported protein, then many imported proteins once a targeting signal evolves. Rhizobia, targeted by about 700 host peptides yet not vertically transmitted, are their case of control without integration. It is a scenario built from systems at different stages, not a sequence observed in any one. | Active |
| THEORY-1119 | Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde propose that minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and normativity set by the system’s own organisation, each necessary and together, they say, sufficient; that individuality without the other two is not agency; and that a system optimizing an externally fixed function is not a model of agency | What the paper proposes, split from THEORY-071 by the tenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern, so that claims needing only the proposal can stand on it. The paper was read in full (NOTE-458), so the reading of what it proposes is held. Whether the definition is right, which turns on an asymmetry criterion its authors call incomplete and on applying the conditions to explicit models, stays THEORY-071’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1163 | Krakauer et al.’s organismal and colonial individuality, A* = I(S_{n+1}; S_n) and A = I(S_{n+1}; S_n | E_n), cannot decrease when variables are moved from the environment into the candidate system, so maximizing either over candidate boundaries selects the largest candidate, and a boundary found this way needs a size cost the measures do not contain | Krakauer, Bertschinger, Olbrich, Flack and Ay (2020), LIT-1137, read in NOTE-1400. Mutual information cannot fall when either argument is enlarged, and A′ ≥ A follows by the chain rule with the remaining environment as condition. It is a fact about the measures, not about any system. It does not say how to price size, and nC, the third measure, can move either way. It is the formal content of A11’s remark recorded in QUESTION-115. | Active |
| THEORY-1194 | Clark and Chalmers argue that if belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so that the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and on a parity principle they state rather than argue | What the extended-mind paper argues, split from THEORY-579 by the sixteenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern (ADR-058’s route), so that CLAIM-175, which argues “on the extended-mind thesis’s own terms”, can stand on the statement of those terms. Both papers were read in full (NOTE-180, NOTE-363), and Clark (2005) says in his own words that the parity principle was not argued. Whether the conditional holds, that coupling of this kind makes a store part of a mind, stays THEORY-579’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1211 | An endosymbiont becomes an organelle in steps: the host first targets effector proteins into it; an imported host protein redundant with one of its functions then lets the endosymbiont’s own gene decay, making it dependent; and a general import pathway, once evolved, brings in hundreds of proteins; this genetic integration arises only in permanent, vertically transmitted associations | The wider thesis Sørensen, Stiller, Kröninger & Nowack assert, filed beside THEORY-1107 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1107, Active, holds the scenario Sørensen and colleagues propose; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1107’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1243 | In incipient endosymbioses in nature, mutual dependence evolves ahead of reproductive cohesion, so that endosymbioses are more likely to be mutually dependent than cohesive | The inference Athreya, Czuppon and Gokhale draw for nature, filed beside THEORY-1050 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1050, Active, holds the model result and its dependence on the trait mapping; whether real symbioses are dependence-first is this entry’s question, with THEORY-1050’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1247 | Griesemer and Shavit propose, as a first and rough sketch, that a collective becomes a new level of individuality only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it, some core interactions have become generatively entrenched, and it has organizational closure, and that such a community can be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone | What Griesemer and Shavit’s sketch proposes. The twenty-fourth status review split it from THEORY-418 (ADR-065 §3), so that the record holds the reading of the proposal apart from the proposal. The paper was read in full (NOTE-173), so the reading is held. Whether the proposal is right is THEORY-418, Proposed, which extends this entry. That needs criteria that sort real groups into the three grades, and worked cases. The paper’s two headline claims, non-circularity and individuality as a special case of collectivity, are in its abstract only and are not part of this entry. | Active |
| THEORY-1276 | In Simondon’s ontology, as his organization-studies readers take it, information is not a signal transmitted between finished entities but a disparity between two differently ordered domains of a metastable system, and its meaning is the new structure that transduction produces in resolving it | Iliadis (2013), LIT-1911, read in NOTE-1485, with Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922. The reading of Simondon on which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024) build their account of communication and meaning. Proposed: both sources are exegesis in their authors’ translations, and Simondon’s text could not be checked. It does not say that information has no quantitative sense, or that meaning can be identified before the resolution occurs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1277 | Persons and organizations can be described not as successive stages, with the collective built up from individuals, but as coexisting levels of ordering through which one action propagates, each preserving its components; on that description the problem of scaling up from individual to organizational action does not arise | Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922, read in NOTE-1483, with Bencherki (2017), LIT-1901. The claim behind the parent paper’s dissolution of the scaling-up problem (LIT-1902, p. 1364). Proposed: a conceptual proposal, illustrated by one meeting excerpt, with no criterion that fixes a level independently of the analyst. It redescribes the problem; it does not show that aggregation never occurs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1278 | Communication can be treated as transduction, the continuity of an action through processes that it transforms, rather than as exchange between parties; meaning is then the contribution an action makes, in retrospect, to a joint individuation, coexisting meanings mark concurrent individuations, and the problem of scaling agency from individual to collective is claimed to dissolve | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1355–1358 and 1363–1365. Simondon’s transduction made into a theory of organizational communication. Proposed: argued from examples, with the dissolution of scaling up asserted. The examples (a synapse, a hunger pang, a piston) show the notion applies to any change, which is its strength as a vocabulary and its weakness as a theory. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1280 | Agency can be redescribed without agents, as the affective force by which one individuation process takes up another’s excess action in a communicative event and both pass from a lesser to an augmented ability to act; agents are then effects of such events, and the absence of the force is disindividuation | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1349–1357. The paper’s central proposal, after the Spinozan formula for affect that Massumi offers as a proposition, not a definition, and Simondon’s individuation. Proposed: argued, and illustrated by one reanalysed meeting. It has no criterion that would let an observation count against it, and it builds the augmenting direction into the definition of agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1285 | Organizational action can be described as pre-individual, so that whose action it is, a person’s or an organization’s, is an outcome of the individuations it is allowed to contribute to rather than a given; an action then has as many significations as the individuations it takes part in, and a person whose action is refused a collective’s recognition experiences that as disindividuation | Bencherki (2017), LIT-1901, read in NOTE-1482, with Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922. The proposal of which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy’s “agency without agents” (LIT-1902) is a development. Proposed: argued, and illustrated by three excerpts from one documentary. Nothing identifies disindividuation apart from the affect it is inferred from, and the account needs, but disclaims, a standard of whose action it rightly was. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1351 | In West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers’s account, a transition in individuality is defined by two separable conditions, mutual dependence (parts that once replicated alone can replicate only within the larger unit) and negligible within-group conflict, and proceeds by forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with no clear border between the steps; across transitions what explains them is an ecological benefit to cooperation together with group formation that unites the members’ interests (clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy, vertical transmission of clonal symbionts), while kin discrimination and the repression of competition played relatively minor roles | West et al. (2015), LIT-2003, read in NOTE-1538. A colloquium review: the definition and the two steps are the authors’ framework, and the explanatory claim is drawn from the comparative literature they cite. Proposed because they call it “tentative”, and because the theory for transitions between species is missing on their own account. It differs from THEORY-141 on mechanism: group formation, not policing, does the work. | Proposed |