The Fluid Nature of Individuality
The concept of individuality or the self is a very fluid concept that we often don’t extend enough effort in exploring.
https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/12/what-is-individual-and-how-do-we-find.html
All biological intelligence are forms of collective and cooperative intelligence that maintain their identity across time in an attractor of non-linear dynamics. Collectives are formed by individuals yet a collective itself has its own individuality. In biology, it is not the individual that survives, but rather the entire collective (i.e. its species).
It is indeed insightful to study roles provided by different genders that lead to the robustness of a species. It is intriguing that the strategies at the genetic level appear to be conserved across many scales. We see robust algorithms in protein folding and in sexual reproduction mechanisms. Just as there are new behaviors that arise as the universe creates new kinds of atoms, there are analogously new kinds of behaviors that biological evolution uncovers that are conserved across species and scale.
In Physics we seek out symmetries so as to find invariances in nature and ultimately laws of nature. In Biology, these invariances are expressed on the notion of individuality or self. Invariance in biology is not just a consequence of causational invariance as found in Physics. But rather a consequence of intentionality enabled by actions forged by causality. Intentions however are a compositional thing. But they only scale if there is shared intentionality across the individuals of the collective.
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to survive as a consequence of the shared consensus among its individual holders. Mining and proof of stake mechanisms are just decentralized consensus making algorithms. Civilizations and societies scale and eventually take over the world as a consequence of consensus mechanisms that coordinate the many individuals in their respective collectives. The same robustness that private property renders in a free economy is represented in the individual subject stance of members of a species. Decision-making is local but there is an emergent behavior of the collective that preserves its identity.
Individuals intentionally sacrifice themselves in wars for the survival of the collective. The downward causation delivered by culture incentivizes the individual to de-prioritize their own individuality. In the grand scheme of biology, it is the males of a species that are sacrificed so that the females of the species continue to pro-create. Males are effectively the red shirt crewmen in Star Trek. The story doesn’t begin when a red-shirt crewman gets vaporized. It always happens at the beginning of every story.
But none of the viewers actually care. They only care about the crew surviving their journey. Thus individuality actually belongs to the crew (i.e. the collective).
