We began with a bacterium whose environment can matter to it without any social relationship.
Now we can introduce another organism.
This changes the problem.
A second organism can alter the conditions under which the first lives.
It can compete.
Cooperate.
Provide resources.
Consume them.
Produce chemicals.
Alter the environment.
And the first organism can respond.
The question is:
When does another organism become significant to an organism rather than merely part of its environment?
From environment to relation
Suppose bacterium A produces a chemical that changes the behaviour of bacterium B.
If B responds in a way that alters conditions for A, a feedback loop begins:
A → B → A
The organisms have become consequential to one another.
That does not yet make them a society.
But something has changed.
We have moved from organism-and-environment to organism-and-organism coupling.
This is the beginning of what we have called relational significance.
The signal
This is where our distinction between signal and sign becomes useful.
A bacterium can release a molecule that another bacterium detects.
The receiving cell's regulatory machinery responds.
No symbolic interpretation is required.
The molecule is a signal because it engages another organism's organisation.
It is not a sign in the semiotic sense.
The significance remains biological.
Quorum sensing
Bacterial quorum sensing gives us a particularly revealing example.
Bacteria can produce and detect extracellular signalling molecules called autoinducers. As these molecules accumulate, their concentration can provide information about population density and, in some systems, community composition. Detection can trigger coordinated changes in gene expression across a population.
The consequences can be substantial.
Bacteria can coordinate activities such as bioluminescence, biofilm formation and production of other compounds, behaviours that can be far more effective when performed collectively.
The important point for us is not that bacteria have invented a primitive language.
They have not.
It is that the activities of individual value-organised cells have become coupled through signals produced and detected by other cells.
Another organism becomes consequential
The signal therefore creates a new kind of relation.
A bacterium's behaviour can alter the chemical environment of its neighbours.
Those neighbours respond.
Their responses alter the conditions again.
The individual organism remains value-organised.
But its possibilities are now partly shaped by the activities of others.
We can express the transition as:
individual value → signal → response → altered conditions → further response
Relational significance has appeared.
But is this social?
Not yet, at least not necessarily.
Quorum sensing is sometimes described as bacterial communication and collective behaviour, and it can produce population-wide coordination.
But we should resist simply declaring that every bacterial signalling system is a social system.
Our distinction is more cautious.
Collective coordination can arise from coupled value-sensitive responses.
Social mattering is a stronger claim: recurrent relations have become organised in ways that constitute a social structure.
The distinction gives us somewhere to go.
The collective appears before the social
This is an important point.
A group can behave collectively without possessing anything like a society in the richer sense.
The members do not need a shared representation of the whole.
They need only respond to conditions produced partly by one another.
The result can be an organised collective pattern.
This is the same principle we later encounter in much larger systems.
Collective form can emerge without a central controller.
Signals can connect many individuals
Quorum sensing makes the transition especially clear because the same signalling system can affect many bacteria.
An individual cell contributes to the concentration of a signal.
Other cells detect that changing concentration.
Once a threshold is reached, many cells can alter their behaviour together.
The consequence is no longer adequately described by looking at one cell in isolation.
The population has acquired a new level of organisation.
And yet the individuals remain value-organised
We should not lose sight of the foundation.
The bacteria have not stopped being individual living systems.
Each cell still maintains itself.
Each has its own metabolism and regulatory organisation.
The collective pattern emerges because those individual systems are coupled.
This is crucial to our project.
We are not replacing biological value with social value.
We are asking how biological value can become organised relationally.
Relational significance is our bridge
We can now see why the intermediate concept is useful.
At the beginning:
biological value — conditions matter to the organism itself.
Now:
relational significance — another organism's activity becomes consequential to the organism's own organisation.
Later:
social mattering — those relations become sufficiently recurrent and organised to constitute a social system.
This gives us a conceptual bridge from the cell to the social world.
The next complication
There is, however, a much more radical way for relationships among living systems to develop.
Instead of remaining separate organisms that signal to one another, previously independent organisms can become integrated into a larger organismic system.
Then the question changes.
What happens to the value of an organism when it becomes part of another organism?
And what happens to the identity of the larger system when it incorporates another living system?
That takes us to one of the strangest transitions in the history of life:
the incorporation of one cell into another.
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