OK, so we happened to take birth on this planet with a fancy brain and extraordinary cognitive skills but what exactly is the human identity? This is a serious and critical debate and needs to “get” resolved. Come on, if you do not even know who you are then what the hell are you doing here?

Excerpts from “What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory” (Jordana Cepelewicz, 2020):

  • And yet, the notion of what it means to be an individual often gets glossed over. “So far we have a concept of ‘individual’ that’s very much like the concept of ‘pile,’” said Maxwell Ramstead, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University. “If there’s a pile of sand, you intuitively know this is a pile of sand. But a pile is not a precisely defined thing. It’s not like after 13 grains, it moves from a collection to a pile.”
  • Such a fundamental definition is absent in part because “biology as a field is completely under-theorized,” said Manfred Laubichler, a theoretical biologist at Arizona State University. “It’s very much still an empirically driven discipline.”
  • In the early 1800s, the French zoologist Georges Cuvier described life as a vortex, “more or less rapid, more or less complicated, the direction of which is invariable, and which always carries along molecules of similar kinds, but into which individual molecules are continually entering, and from which they are continually departing; so that the form of a living body is more essential to it than its matter.” Many philosophers and biologists have taken up this “process view,” in which organisms and other biological systems exist not as fixed objects or materials but as flowing patterns and relationships in a river of flux.
  • Krakauer and Flack, in collaboration with colleagues such as Nihat Ay of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, realized that they’d need to turn to information theory to formalize their principle of the individual “as kind of a verb.” To them, an individual was an aggregate that “preserved a measure of temporal integrity,” propagating a close-to-maximal amount of information forward in time.
  • Ramstead hypothesizes that their approach is missing a consideration of how an individual maintains the boundary that delimits itself. “Organisms aren’t just individuated,” he said. “They have access to information about their individuation.” To him, the kind of information that Krakauer and Flack’s framework uses might not be “knowable” to an organism: “It’s not clear to me that the organism could use these information metrics that they define in a way that would allow it to preserve its existence,” he said.
  • As an alternative, Ramstead is collaborating with Karl Friston, a renowned neuroscientist at University College London, to build a theory around Friston’s “free-energy principle” of biological self-organization. 
  • The free-energy principle asserts that any self-organizing system will look as if it generates predictions about its environment and seeks to minimize the error of those predictions. For organisms, that means in part that they are constantly measuring their sensory and perceptual experiences against their expectations.
  • “You can literally interpret the body of an organism as a guess about the structure of the environment,” Ramstead said. And by acting in ways that maintain the integrity of those expectations over time, the organism defines itself as an individual apart from its surroundings.

Excerpts from “The information theory of individuality” [24 March 2020, David Krakauer, Nils Bertschinger, Eckehard Olbrich, Jessica C. Flack & Nihat Ay; Theory in Biosciences volume 139, pages209–223(2020)]:

  • Individuality can be continuous, with the possible surprising result that some processes possess greater individuality than others.
  • Individuality can emerge at any level of organization.
  • Individuality can be nested.
  • Allowing individuality to be continuous rather than binary, nested, and possible at any level, opens the door for more quantitative takes on familiar open questions in evolutionary theory including the relation between the units of selection and temporal and spatial correlation and whether individuality at one scale impacts coherence and autonomy and “lower” and “higher” scales.
  • Our proposal that individuals are aggregates that propagate information from the past to the future and have temporal integrity can be viewed as a pragmatic operational definition that captures the idea there is something persistent about individuals. However, our motivation for defining individuality this way is actually much deeper. It lies in the information-theoretic interpretation of entropy, its connection to the physical theory of thermodynamics, and formal definition of work introduced by Clausius in the 1860s [see (Müller 2007) for an introduction to this history].
  • It is fair to assume that long-lived aggregates could develop the capacity to replicate and become a significant target for selection and hence a bona fide level at which selection operates, which for some is what is implied by biological individuality (Okasha 2006), in which case our approach could provide a means of identifying both pre-individuals (low autonomy) as well as fully fledged individuals (high autonomy). 
  • The purpose of this paper has been to place the discussion of adaptive individuality on a solid logical and probabilistic foundation.
  • It is fair to assume that long-lived aggregates could develop the capacity to replicate and become a significant target for selection and hence a bona fide level at which selection operates, which for some is what is implied by biological individuality (Okasha 2006), in which case our approach could provide a means of identifying both pre-individuals (low autonomy) as well as fully fledged individuals (high autonomy). 
  • Our approach is related to the concept of autopoiesis developed by Maturana (Maturana 1975) who emphasizes the “unity” of a network of processes engaged in self-production in terms of autonomy (Maturana 1980), and the idea of a Gestalt perception in which the figure is observed to be more than the sum of its parts and distinct from the parts of its grounding.
  • There is also a connection to the free-energy principle (FEP) as developed by Karl Friston and collegues Ramstead et al. (2018). Like the ITI, the FEP is built from first principles, moving forward from Schrodinger, and with the goal of explaining how adaptive systems resist decay and persist over time. It also stresses uncertainty reduction, but does through the lens of minimizing free energy.

[to be continued….]