The concept of individuation has suffered from its being mostly connected with Jungian psychology or nominalist philosophy. In this paper, “individuation” will be understood rather as a process; and in particular, as a series of stages (morphological and/or cognitive) that an organism passes through during its lifespan.
In most species, individuation is restricted to a short period in early life, as when birds acquire their species specific songs; while in humans - and a few other species of birds or mammals (although to a much lesser degree) - individuation is a life-long, open-ended process. In this understanding, individuation becomes narrowly connected to learning. And since learning necessarily depends on what is already learned, the trajectory of learning-based individuation is necessarily indefinite and dependent on the concrete chance events and steps whereby the process has proceeded. Semiotic individuation is a historical process, and this fact explains why systems biology, as established by Ludwig van Bertalanffy , has not been capable of meeting the hope, expressed long ago by Ernst Cassirer, of bridging the mechanicist-vitalist gap in biology. Instead, a semiotic approach is called for.
Human individuation, moreover, is special in a very important sense: language use implies that humans from earliest childhood inescapably become entangled in an 'as-if-world', a virtual reality, a story about who we are and how our life ‘here and now’ belongs within our own life-history, as well as within the greater pattern of the world around us. Human individuation is thus a double-tracked process, consisting in an incessant reconciliation or negotiation between the virtual reality that we have constructed in our minds and mind-independent reality as it impresses itself upon our lives. Human life cannot therefore be defined by its uniqueness as a particular genetic combination, but must be instead be defined by its uniqueness as a temporal outcome of semiotic individuation. Accordingly, this double-tracked character of human semiotic individuation implies that it is cast as just one particular outcome of a combinatorics with an infinite number of possible outcomes. It is suggested here that our ingrained feeling of possessing a free will is buried in this fact.