Identity is Always Foundational: What Must Be True Before a System Can Pursue Anything

Levin and Resnik demonstrate, with considerable empirical force, that biological systems across scales behave as goal-directed agents. Regenerating tissues restore anatomy. Cell collectives pursue morphogenetic end-states. Bioelectric perturbations rewrite target outcomes. These findings are not rhetorical; they are experimentally tractable and interventionally meaningful.
Identology begins one step earlier.Before we ask whether a system is goal-directed, intelligent, or agential, we must ask what it means for a system to persist as the same system at all. Not everything that endures qualifies. A rock persists passively. A cell persists actively. The difference is not semantic; it is architectural.
Systems capable of autoteria maintain themselves within viable regions. Systems with orthesis bias trajectories away from constraint violation before collapse occurs. Recursive systems modify the machinery of their own maintenance. On this view, goal-directedness is not a primitive property added on top of physics. It is the externally legible expression of deep persistence architecture.
Levin and Resnik's work maps the behavioral and experimental surface of these architectures. Identology provides the ontological substrate that explains why such descriptions apply in the first place.