Individuation, Adaptability and Cognition in Biological Systems: A Philosophical Modeling

In his doctoral thesis, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, Simondon formulates three key philosophical claims that we consider crucial. First, in complex physical or biological systems, individuation is not merely a property of an individual, rather, individuality always results from an individuation process. Second, a biological individuated system has a distinctive feature: it acts on its own stage. Third, there must be some non-trivial recursive procedure through which a physical individuated system can switch into a biological one. In this chapter, we propose a philosophical model to further develop this conceptual scheme. This will allow us to characterize biological individuation as a second-order organisation, and to directly connect it with the two concepts of heteronomy and adaptability. We will show that, unlike physical individuation, biological individuation is self-specifying. However it does not do so within a logic of maintenance, as proposed by Francisco Varela, who used a symbolism similar to us. Instead, it follows a logic of heteronomy and adaptability, the logic of life. Varela’s model therefore appears to be a special case within a broader theoretical framework, which is the only way to understand how new constraints/norms/functions can emerge in a biological system, whether at the evolutionary, ontogenetic or behavioural level. Finally, to say that biological individuation is self-specifying is to say that it can be interpreted, and that we cannot understand how a biological system works if we remain fixated on a strictly causal mode of explanation, and on the search for mechanisms, as if it were a watch, a radiator or a computer. We fail to see that, through and by specific biological repair, immune and perceptive devices, it works in a world of signs, in such a way that biological organisation and cognition are always already coupled at the outset. It is only evolution that will gradually uncouple what has been coupled.