Colonial Readiness: Life at the Boundary of the One and the Many: 4 Individuation: The Perspectival Life of Cells

Colonial systems make a simple claim devastatingly clear: individuation is not a property but a perspective. It is neither a binary state nor a biological milestone. It is a relational cut—an enacted way of occupying the potential of the colony. In Volvox and its relatives, individuality is never “achieved” and never “abandoned.” It is continuously lived as a shifting configuration of construals.

A cell in a colonial body does not possess its own identity in the representational sense. It does not carry a miniature blueprint of “what it is.” It participates in a field of readiness that far exceeds anything that could be localised inside it. But it does not dissolve into the collective either. Its perspectival location—its situated construal of the colony’s potential—matters. It matters so much, in fact, that without it the colony would not exist as a coherent event at all.

A somatic cell near the colony’s equator construes the potentials of beating and alignment differently from a cell in a gonidial region. These construals are not beliefs or representations; they are enacted orientations, lived biases in how readiness becomes available at that point in the colony’s structure. The cell’s “role” is not predefined. It is cut out of the relational field by the way each local perspective makes sense of the colony’s overall theory.

A colony is therefore not a group of individuals nor a singular organism. It is a collective of perspectival loci, each enacting its own construal of the same distributed potential. Individuation emerges as the degree and character of this local construal. A cell becomes “more” or “less” individuated depending on how tightly its perspective fuses with or diverges from the integrated readiness of the whole.

Seen this way, individuality ceases to be a categorical distinction. There is no moment when a cell stops being an “individual” and becomes a “part.” Nor is there any moment when the colony becomes the “real” organism. Instead we find a cline of individuation: from near-fusion, where the cell’s construal aligns almost seamlessly with the colony’s global orientation, to partial autonomy, where local constraints open potentials unavailable elsewhere.

This cline is not noise—it is the colony’s coherence.

Without perspectival differentiation, the colony would collapse into uniformity and lose all capacity for coordinated behaviour. Without perspectival alignment, it would fragment into competing loci with no shared readiness. The colony lives precisely in the dynamic tension between these poles.

Thus, individuated perspective is not opposed to collective life; it is its enabling condition. Colonial behaviour—phototaxis, rotation, developmental reconfiguration—only becomes possible because each cell enacts a distinct construal of the colony’s readiness while remaining responsive to how other cells construe it. Collective life is the emergent alignment of construals, not the suppression of individuals.

This reframes the major philosophical question usually posed about colonial systems: “Where does individuality reside?” The relational answer is: nowhere and everywhere. There is no privileged site where “true” individuality lives. There are only perspectives—each a partial instantiation of the colony’s theory—woven together into a coherent event.

Individuation is the lived interface between the many and the one.

A cell is not an individual because it is separate.

It is an individual because its construal matters to the colony’s becoming.

In the next post, we move from perspectival individuation to behaviour: how the colony’s actions are enactments of readiness distributed across these perspectival alignments, rather than mechanisms executed by parts.