Pierrick Bourrat (2023), Biology & Philosophy (Springer), vol. 38, article 33 (Open Access) — DOI-10.1007/s10539-023-09917-x
Key takeaways
- Higher-level biological individuals are coarse-grained summaries of lower-level entities. Their quasi-ontological status comes from the pragmatic fact that, under limited measurement and computation, a coarse-grained model predicts further ahead than a fine-grained one, and this is what justifies assigning collectives their own fitness parameter at the last stage of an evolutionary transition.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-064. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Explaining how individuals emerge in evolution is hard because “emergence” is hard to pin down. Bourrat proposes a pragmatic account: the individuals that come out of an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) are coarse-grained entities, summaries of lower-level evolutionary processes. This looks epistemic, but he argues it can support emergence in a quasi-ontological sense. He applies it to Godfrey-Smith and Kerr’s (2013) staged model of ETIs, arguing that giving collectives a separate fitness parameter at the final stage is necessary and not merely a modelling convenience.
Standing in the record
Filed from the survey of 2026-09-25 of work the anthology set aside as out of scope (tier B): 560 seconds of active reading over 10 sessions in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-064 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Proposed — a lucid philosophical statement of “individual = a coarse-graining worth its cost”. Its formal criterion is informal and, as written, degenerate: minimal δC picks the finest partition, and the cost term the argument depends on is never put into the criterion. It would be settled by a worked ETI model in which an explicit accuracy–cost objective is computed and picks out the collectives.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-064, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: high — 10 sessions and 560 s make it the most-returned-to work in this batch, and it is load-bearing for the individuality cluster. The skim captures the argument but not the Fig. 1–2 formal details or how it relates to the held companion paper.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-064 is that reading):
- It is the direct philosophical companion to Krakauer et al.’s information theory of individuality (the triage names the held “Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individuality”). A deeper read should check how the cost-of-prediction criterion relates to that causal/informational line.
- Coarse-graining as “a model that predicts well per unit of compute” is structurally the same idea as representation learning and state abstraction. Check whether the paper’s algorithm is precise enough to operationalize; it is presented informally with toy examples.
- The quasi-ontological claim rests on the assumption that a functional map exists between levels (a footnote concedes this may be assumed rather than shown). That is the weakest joint.
Access when seeded: Crossref metadata (online 2023-08-14) and the full text as Europe PMC XML (PMC10425515, open access), which I read: introduction, all section heads, the coarse-graining sections, the pragmatic/quasi-ontology section, the MLS1/MLS2 section, conclusion and footnotes. Springer’s own PDF link returned a bot challenge. The survey’s title ends “…lower-level interactions”; the published title ends “…lower-level evolutionary processes”. Volume 38(4), article 33 per Crossref.