If pyrosomes show that life can unify through synchrony, bacteria reveal something even more radical: coherence without organisms at all.
No cells with differentiated roles. No tissues. No body. No clear boundary.
In bacterial communities — biofilms, swarms, mats, soil consortia, marine aggregates — what coheres is not a colony, nor even a collective, but a field:
a continuous chemical topology of gradients, attractors, and thresholds.
Bacteria are not individuals acting within a context.
They are loci in a chemical readiness landscape — peaks, wells, currents, and folds of inclination.
Ecology is not external to them.
It is their individuation.
Chemical Gradients: Inclination Made Material
Every bacterial process — motility, division, differentiation, adhesion — is modulated not by internal programmes but by chemical fields:
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Nutrient gradients
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Oxygen gradients
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Signal molecules (AHLs, peptides, autoinducers)
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pH and redox landscapes
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Metabolic by-product diffusion
A bacterium’s “decision” is never a local choice.
It is a construal of the gradient geometry that runs through and around it.
Readiness here is not distributed in the sense of “shared across cells”; it is literally spatial — a structure of chemical potentials sculpted by the entire metabolic ecology.
A single bacterium is thus a perspective inside a field of inclination, not an agent navigating an external environment.
This is the most radical relational cut:
the individual dissolves into the chemical terrain that constitutes it.
Quorum Sensing: Inclination as Density-Dependent Resonance
Quorum sensing is often described as communication, or as a “vote” on whether to express a collective behaviour. But this is misleading.
There is no message, no intention, no negotiation.
It is density-dependent phase transition in the readiness field.
As autoinducers accumulate, the local chemical landscape shifts until the uptake dynamics of each cell tilt together. At that threshold:
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virulence genes activate,
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luminescence pathways turn on,
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biofilm adhesins appear,
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metabolic programs reorganise.
This is not group coordination.
It is collective inclination arising from shared chemical curvature.
Quorum sensing operates like water boiling: once the field reaches its threshold, it changes state everywhere at once.
The behaviour is the field.
Cells simply enact the local gradient.
Biofilms: Morphogenesis Without Organisms
Biofilms are not colonies of bacteria glued together.
They are chemical-morphological attractors: spatial structures that emerge from feedback loops between metabolism, diffusion, adhesion, and mechanical stress.
Key features:
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EPS (extracellular polymeric substances) create microenvironments.
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Channels and pores arise from nutrient and oxygen gradients.
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Differentiated zones of metabolic activity (aerobic edge, anaerobic core) self-organise.
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Antibiotic tolerance emerges as a spatial field effect, not a trait of individuals.
There is no developmental programme.
There is no organismal state.
There is only the continuum of readiness, folded by ecological constraints and microbial activity.
Biofilms are tissues without bodies;
they are ecologies that have become morphogenetic.
Where embryogenesis actualises a species’ structured potential,
biofilms actualise a collective chemical topology.
Swarming and Flocking: Fluid Individuation
In swarming bacteria (e.g., Proteus, Bacillus, Pseudomonas), cells elongate, hyper-flagellate, and form dynamic, flowing fronts.
These fronts:
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arise from mechanical coupling,
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are shaped by surfactants and hydration fields,
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display finger-like branching patterns,
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and dissolve back into solitary cells when conditions change.
Individuation here is conditional.
A bacterium is a “cell” only in certain regions of the readiness field.
Elsewhere it is simply a point in a living flow.
The swarm is not many individuals.
The swarm is a phase.
When the hydration field collapses, individuality reasserts itself.
When it expands, individuality dissolves.
This is individuation as a reversible recutting, governed by chemical topology.
Chemical Ecology: The Field That Thinks (Without Thinking)
Bacteria do not live in an environment.
They live as gradients, fluxes, and diffusing signals.
This has three profound consequences:
1. The individual is not primary.
A cell is a temporary constraint on a chemical flow.
Most bacterial “traits” are emergent properties of the field, not the cell.
2. Agency is replaced by local enactment of global curvature.
A bacterium “moves toward food” because the chemical landscape biases its tumbling frequency.
Perception and action collapse into the same relationship:
the organism is an inflection in the field it enacts.
3. Ecology and development become indistinguishable.
Biofilm growth is ecological morphogenesis.
Quorum sensing is ecological individuation.
Antibiotic resistance is ecological reconfiguration.
Life becomes ecological all the way down — no interior programme, no modular organism, only unfolding readiness landscapes.
The Ontological Lesson
Bacteria reveal the deepest extension of the relational framework:
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In corals, individuation is modular.
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In bryozoans, it is architectural.
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In sponges, it is fluid.
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In siphonophores, it is composite.
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In pyrosomes, it is temporal.
But in bacteria:
individuation is dissolved into the field itself.
Readiness is not held by cells.
It is a property of the chemical ecology that cells help constitute.
The “bacterial community” is thus not a many-made-one, nor a one-made-many.
It is a landscape of inclination through which cells drift, differentiate, and disappear.
Next we turn to the most philosophically revealing case of all:
slime moulds, where individuality flickers in and out of existence, and the organism becomes a negotiation between dispersal and union — a living demonstration that the one and the many are just alternate cuts through the same field of potential.
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