From Ability to Inclination to Meaning — The Migration of Agency: 1 The Gradient of Collective Actualisation

How agency migrates from distributed structures to relational fields to symbolic worlds.

Across life, collective action is ubiquitous, but the way it is enacted shifts radically across scales. The patterns we observed in colonial organisms, eusocial insects, vertebrate societies, and humans suggest a gradient of collective actualisation, where the locus of agency moves from the material to the relational to the symbolic.

This post introduces the series and the conceptual lens that will guide it.

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1. Collective Life as Relational Phenomenon

In all living systems, coherence emerges not from a pre-given organismal blueprint, but from the alignment of potentials across individuated loci:

• In colonial organisms (Volvox, corals, bryozoans), the collective’s ability is distributed physically and structurally.

• In vertebrates (herds, geladas), the collective emerges primarily through inclination — gradients of attention, alliance, and positional bias.

• In humans, the collective is enacted through symbolic ability — semiotic structures that make action, obligation, and coordination possible beyond immediate presence.

The central insight: agency migrates from ability → inclination → symbolic ability as life scales and individuation strengthens.

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2. Ability: Distributed Aperture of Possibility

At the base of the gradient, collective ability manifests as system-level potential:

• Cells in a Volvox sphere coordinate swimming and reproduction.

• Eusocial insects perform construction, defence, and foraging through caste-aligned morphologies.

Here, coherence is emergent from architecture. The system is the locus of agency, and individuation is minimal.

Key feature: ability is physically instantiated, constrained, and partially prefigured by the collective structure.

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3. Inclination: Relational Alignment

As we move up the gradient:

• Vertebrate herds synchronise movement through attentional and positional biases.

• Gelada societies coordinate via multi-layered alliances and attentional gradients.

Now, agency resides not in physical structure but in the alignment of individual inclinations.

• Each vertebrate maintains autonomy, but coherence arises from perspectival attunement.

• Individuation is graded, fluid, and dynamic.

• Ability becomes emergent rather than architecturally prefigured.

This is the domain where perspectival alignment explains coherence without invoking a superorganism.

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4. Symbolic Ability: Semiotic Reconfiguration

At the apex, humans demonstrate a further migration:

• Agency moves into the symbolic realm, where readiness fields are shaped by meaning, narrative, and institutions.

• Collective action is sustained not by architecture or alignment alone, but by symbolically mediated coordination.

• Roles, norms, laws, and cultural practices instantiate potential across time, space, and absence.

This is the semiotic expansion of readiness, where individuation and collective coherence are co-constructed through symbols.

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5. Why the Gradient Matters

Understanding this gradient illuminates:

• Why inclination dominates vertebrate sociality — the physical distribution of ability no longer suffices.

• Why human sociality is ontologically distinct — symbolic structures create entirely new possibilities for alignment.

• How individuality emerges as perspectival alignment at each stage.

In short: sociality is graded individuation, and the locus of collective agency migrates systematically along this gradient.

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6. The Road Ahead

This series will trace the gradient step by step:

1. Ability in colonial and eusocial systems

2. Inclination in vertebrate societies

3. Symbolic ability in humans

Each post will highlight:

• How coherence emerges

• How individuation is constituted

• How collective action is realised

Together, they reveal the deep logic of agency migration — from cells to colonies, from herds to human symbolic worlds.