Colonial Readiness: Life at the Boundary of the One and the Many: 5 Behaviour as Enacted Readiness

Colonial behaviour is often described as if it were the product of mechanisms: flagella beat, flows generate rotation, differential shading drives phototaxis. But this mechanistic story is not wrong so much as orthogonal. It tells us how certain motions occur, but it cannot tell us what behaviour is. Mechanisms describe pathways. Behaviour describes actualisation—the construal of possibility into event.

In colonial life, behaviour is not something the colony “does.” It is what becomes enacted when a distributed field of readiness aligns around a shift in construal. The colony’s rotation, its phototactic orientation, its remarkable mixture of robustness and exquisite sensitivity—all these are not outputs. They are relational enactments: ways in which the colony’s structured potential opens toward particular trajectories from a situated perspective.

Rotation as alignment of construals

Take rotation. In a representational frame, rotation is a solution to a design problem: how to ensure even light exposure, how to maintain symmetry, how to integrate local cell actions into a coordinated whole. But rotation is not the solution to anything. It is the actualisation of a readiness distributed across the colony’s geometry, ECM tension, hydrodynamic coupling, and the perspectival asymmetries each cell enacts.

Rotation emerges when the colony’s relational field construes itself as requiring a globally coherent flow. No cell intends it. No mechanism commands it. Rather, each cell’s partial perspective becomes aligned with neighbouring perspectives such that the colony’s theory “collapses” into a rotational event. Rotation is what readiness looks like when asymmetries cohere.

Phototaxis as shifted aperture, not algorithm

Phototaxis exposes the same principle even more sharply. Standard accounts insist that colonies “compare light intensities” and “execute corrective adjustments.” But comparison and correction are representational metaphors. The colony does not evaluate information; it inhabits a field of gradients that reorient the aperture of its readiness.

A light gradient is not a signal. It is a tilt in the colony’s landscape of potential. Cells on the illuminated side enact construals shaped by heat, feedback from flagellar synchrony, and local shading. Cells on the darker side enact different construals. Phototaxis arises when these perspectival differences integrate into a coherent shift in orientation. The colony does not steer. It becomes steered by the relational field it co-enacts.

Phototaxis is not computation but perspectival convergence: a multi-locus realignment of how the colony construes its next actualisation.

Robustness and sensitivity: two faces of relational readiness

The paradoxical combination of robustness and sensitivity in colonial systems likewise becomes intelligible only under a readiness ontology. Mechanistic accounts treat robustness as noise-tolerance and sensitivity as responsiveness—two forces to be balanced. But in a relational frame, both arise from the same source: the colony’s distributed potential.

Where perspectival alignment is tight, the colony behaves robustly; perturbations are absorbed because the field of readiness construes itself as maintaining coherence. Where alignment loosens—where asymmetries open a wider aperture of possibility—the colony is exquisitely sensitive, able to actualise new trajectories from minimal changes in conditions.

Robustness is the colony staying open to the same next event;

sensitivity is the colony staying open to another.

Neither is an emergent property. Both are ontological stances the colony can enact, depending on how construals align or diverge. What mechanistic explanation treats as competing causal forces are, in readiness terms, coordinated shifts in the relational structure of potential.

Behaviour without a centre

Across these examples, behaviour is not the execution of a pre-given script or the product of distributed computation. It is the enactment of readiness: the becoming-event of a relational field that has oriented itself toward a particular cut of possibility.

There is no centre from which behaviour is directed.

There is no part that “decides.”

There is only the colony’s readiness collapsing into its next moment.

This reframes not just colonial life but biological behaviour more broadly. Agency becomes a perspectival convergence within a relational field—not a substance or a mechanism, but a way a system of potentials aligns itself to become something.

In the next post, we turn to development and inversion: how colonial life transforms itself by re-partitioning its own readiness, rather than assembling itself from predefined parts.