In 1922, Kurt Lewin introduced the concept of 'genidenity'- as an 'existential relationship underlying the genesis of an object from one moment to the next'. His concern was to define this in terms so basic as to be applicable in every type of science.
How was this reconcilable with the Leibnizian principle of the 'identity of indiscernibles'? If physicists can't distinguish one electron or some other such particle from another, is it really the case that the history of the particle makes it distinguishable? Where is that history preserved? How do we access it? Surely information of that sort would itself use up energy so as to subsist? Would not positing the existence of such information alter how laws relating to conservation of energy operate? We think of history as a constantly expanding database. If energy is being diverted to power that database surely this would become noticeable at the experimental level?
Reichenbach's approach is to consider genidentity as a topological relationship- a metric defined by events themselves- but this makes genidentity crucially dependent on causality. What if the Liebnizian principle of sufficient reason is not true of the real world? What if not everything is subject to strict laws of causality? In that case might not genidentity, like causality, be only a limit case rather than something fundamental such as must arise in every epistemic context?
As both mathematical and experimental physics developed in richer and stranger directions, philosophy lost salience or an ability to keep up. Thus, my memory is, by the late Seventies, there was little interest in this concept. However, a game theoretic notion from evolutionary biology- John Maynard Smith's notion of uncorrelated asymmetries as giving rise to eusoical 'bourgeois strategies'- may have shed light on what, psychologically speaking, 'genidentity' might mean and how it might be reconciled with a Shannon type approach to information and energy. The key concept here is information as negentropy which in turn could be linked to the free energy principle or the notion that informational value has to do with 'surprise'.
Briefly, the notion here is that if an uncorrelated asymmetry is preserved- this is likely to happen for 'regret minimizing' reasons- in other words, if agents know which role they are assigned in a given 'game' or interaction- and the system is non-dissipative or isolated- then it must be the case that there is a constraint on 'informativity' growth such that total energy is conserved. Equally, if Life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape, there would be an evolutionary drive to increase informativity by reducing 'surprise'- i.e. permitting richer semantic structures so as to increase the efficiency of signaling. My impression is that the magic of coevolution can tame complexity, for specific purposes, faster than it can arise and so there is no actual physicalist constraint. I suppose there is two-way 'transfer entropy' of a non-linear type. But this means there can be two different 'Granger causalities' associated with what appears to be a single autoregressive model. Alternatively, one could speak of Renyi divergence and get to something like a Parrondo game. In other words, a 'money-pump' is the pleasant surprise some agent may receive. But this is stochastic which means there is no reason why semantic processing as a whole should be centralized or autonomous. In other words, 'genidentity' is not necessarily phenomenological. The project of holistic or 'gestalt' psychology may involve something very rich and strange with the body over here and the soul elsewhere and the heart torn between the two. In this sense, the persistence of uncorrelated asymmetries- our sense of individuation- is actually ontologically dysphoric for purely 'Presentist' or even 'Actualist' reasons. Even if all information was costlessly available, Being would not be founded wholly upon it. Thus genidentity is real only because it is an existential relationship with the incompossible. The alternative is a Sen-tentious theory of 'multiple identities' of a vacuous or mischievous sort.
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