Cohesiveness is not an adequate theory of general individuation and it does not account for living individuals

Villalobos and Razeto-Barry defend the idea that autopoiesis theory (AT) is mainly concerned with living beings and therefore, it needs to account not only for the organisation of a given system but also for its material individuality. In this sense, they attempt to offer a ‘sketchy’ definition of individuality whose main element is cohesiveness.

It is true that living beings are somewhat cohesive, but this is not the most relevant aspect of their individuality and living cohesion does not seem to depend on the same principles as material cohesion. I think that vitalists, however mistaken they were, had a point when they thought the normal properties of matter as insufficient to account for such a complex phenomenon as biological constitution. Furthermore, as far as I remember, that problem was one of the main motivations behind the programme of general system theory and it was also a big issue for the initial proponents of AT. Maybe it is the difficulty of accounting for biological unity in purely material language what motivates a formalistic approach in various attempts to define living individuality, including some interpretations of AT.

There are certainly specific fields in science that explain the cohesive properties of physical bodies, for example, condensed matter physics. However, their explananda are not individuals but structural properties. This is why individuality is in these studies just an accidental arrangement of molecules having some distinct property. In fact, we intuitively tend to understand cohesive structures as pieces of stuff, not as individuals in their own right. This is reflected in many languages, for example, in English – when we use countable and uncountable nouns. Things such as marble, water and sand are not thought of as individuals but as pieces of matter. This is completely alien to the way we conceive of biological individuals. For instance, if we fused together two pieces of marble, we would obtain another instance of marble. That does not generally happen with living beings. The difference is more significant when we think about separation: if we cut a piece of marble into two, we would be left with two pieces of marble. If we cut a lizard into two, we cannot hope to obtain two smaller lizards.

In other words, I think that the laws that explain the cohesion of ordinary objects are qualitatively different from the laws that would explain the unity of complex objects, particularly living beings. Erwin Schrödinger (1967) had already pointed this out when he set apart the structure of physical objects from the structure of living beings. The former corresponds to a periodic crystal structure and to understand them is relatively an ‘easy’ problem. The hard problem of individuality is to account for the unity of aperiodic crystals whose complexity cannot be explained directly with conventional physics (at least not in the relevant sense that we intend when we take seriously the problem of life). To say that living unity is a particular instance of material cohesion that happens to coincide with autopoietic organisation is in my view wrong.