When direction of selection on particle character depends on context (other particles), particle character does not determine its own fitness; the collective is not redundant

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• If collective characters are determined by aggregative sum of particle characters, collective is explanatorily redundant in selectionclaim0.850
• How Can Nondecomposable Collective Characters Produce Particle Fitnessquestion0.834
• H1: Individuality requires a dynamical process (development), mediating the plastic expression of components in the context of one another, with the specific form of computing a collective character that is a non-linearly separable function of (embryonic) particle characters, with the effect of coordinating reproduction based on this collective character.hypothesis0.801
  Main hypothesis about the architecture of individuality
• The collective often displays new behaviors or preferences that are not simply the sum of individual cell behaviors.claim0.791
  Key property of collective intelligence: emergent behaviors at the group level.
• Why would lower-level selection favor traits that reduce particles' independent response to selection and increase dependence on collective?question0.785
  Unresolved tension: individuation mechanisms seemingly oppose particle-level fitness, yet must evolve through bottom-up selection.
• For collectives to be meaningful evolutionary units, fitness interactions must be non-linearly separable, not merely non-aggregative.claim0.780
  Strengthens distinction between monotonic non-linear interactions (explanatorily redundant) and non-decomposable interactions (causally significant).
• A purely cognitive particle has no representational basis on which to distinguish self-generated from environment-generated observations; metacognitive architecture is the prerequisite for the separation priorclaim0.777
  Developmental account of why and when sigma emerges during ontogeny
• it creates a ‘we’; what we are doing, for example, whether our behaviours are coordinated or not, becomes a relevant variable.quote0.771
  Illustrates how non-separable functions shift identity to the collective level.