Colonial Readiness: Life at the Boundary of the One and the Many: 1 Why Coloniality Needs a Readiness Ontology

Colonial organisms such as Volvox occupy a place in biology where the conceptual ground becomes treacherous. We call them “colonies,” yet they behave as coherent agents. We call their constituent cells “individuals,” yet they do not live independent lives. We call their developmental operations “programmed,” yet nothing in them behaves like a program. They refuse the familiar binaries: organism vs collective, development vs behaviour, instruction vs emergence.

This is precisely the terrain where representational metaphysics collapses. And it is precisely the terrain where a readiness ontology begins to show its force.

The colonial dilemma: too many individuals, too few organisms

The volvocine lineage defies classification because its architecture violates the assumptions that anchor the modern life sciences:

• If an organism is defined by autonomous integrity, a Volvox colony fails.

• If an organism is defined by functional unity, a Volvox colony succeeds too well.

• If individuality is genetic, nothing is gained by calling the cells separate.

• If individuality is behavioural, the colony behaves more like a single agent than many.

• If individuality is developmental, the very process of inversion makes a mockery of genetic-program metaphors.

The result is a set of pseudo-questions:

• “Is Volvox an organism or a collective?”

• “When does a colony become an individual?”

• “What degree of cooperation is required to count as multicellularity?”

These questions are unanswerable because they are malformed. They presuppose that ontology is carved into discrete objects and that life must respect these partitions. But colonial biology reveals the opposite: life is a field of potential continuously recut by perspectival processes.

To make sense of colonial life, we need a different ontology—one that treats biological processes not as mechanisms executing representational instructions but as enactments of readiness.

The representational myths that break on colonial shores

Three dominant metaphors become untenable when faced with Volvox.

1. The Blueprint Myth

The claim: the genome contains a representation of the organism’s form and behaviour.

The failure: colonial architecture is not specified in any representational sense; it emerges from patterned constraints, ECM mechanics, and hydrodynamic couplings that are nowhere encoded as “instructions.”

2. The Programme Myth

The claim: development follows a sequence of prescribed steps.

The failure: Volvox inversion is a global reconfiguration that arises from local mechanics. Nothing in the genome contains a “steplist” for coordinated inversion—only potentials that cells and ECM enact differentially.

3. The Organism Myth

The claim: individuality is a discrete property possessed by bounded systems.

The failure: all such boundaries are perspectival artefacts. The colony functions as a coherent agent only because cells enact aligned perspectives of a shared potential.

Representational metaphysics cannot accommodate these failures because it assumes what Volvox denies: that meaning, structure, and purpose are stored rather than enacted.

Readiness as the alternative

A readiness ontology shifts the ground completely.

Rather than speak of blueprints, instructions, or entities, we speak of potential structured by relation.

The readiness triad reframes colonial biology:

• Ability — the structured horizon of what the colony can in principle do.

• Inclination — local biases that tilt readiness toward specific enactments.

• Individuation — perspectival loci that actualise the shared potential differently.

This is not a mechanism; it is a relational ontology. It does not ask what causes what, but how potentials are constrained, partitioned, and enacted.

It is exactly the conceptual architecture that colonial life demands.

Why coloniality forces the question

Colonial organisms sit at the boundary between the one and the many—not as a puzzle to be solved but as a demonstration of ontology itself. They reveal that:

• there is no single locus that “holds” the organism,

• no representational core that determines developmental outcomes,

• no unit of selection that pre-exists the field of enacted readiness.

What we call an organism is a conventional label applied after the fact to a temporary alignment of perspectival enactments.

Colonial life makes this explicit.

Cells in a Volvox colony do not contain separate destinies. They participate in a shared field of possibility whose enactments differ by position, bias, and relational context. The colony exists as a coordinated leaning—a coherence of readiness, not an entity with fixed boundaries.

This is why coloniality is not a mere biological curiosity but a decisive conceptual hinge. It shows us that individuality, development, and behaviour emerge not from encoded representations but from the relational partitioning of potential.

What the readiness lens reveals

When applied to colonial organisms, readiness clarifies:

• Why colony-level behaviour is robust (integrated ability)

• Why certain perturbations produce directional changes (tilted inclinations)

• Why division of labour stabilises without teleology (perspectival individuation)

• Why transitions to multicellularity can be gradual (continuous recutting of potentials)

• Why individuality debates fail (they treat boundaries as primitives, not enactments)

Colonial organisms are not halfway between unicellular and multicellular life. They are demonstrations of what it means for readiness to be relationally distributed.

The colony is not an “emergent super-organism.”

Nor is it a “collective of individuals.”

It is the actualisation of a field of readiness—cut through multiple aligned perspectives.

Why this series

This first post establishes the need for a readiness ontology in colonial biology. It clears the conceptual terrain and opens the path for the posts that follow:

• ability as distributed aperture

• inclination as positional bias

• individuation as perspectival construal

• behaviour as enactment

• development as re-cutting

• evolution as redistribution of readiness

• individuality as alignment

• and finally, the mythic lens that shows how these insights refract into meaning.

Colonial organisms are not marginal cases. They are where biology shows its ontology. And the readiness framework is what lets us see it clearly.