Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity

Abstract

Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized “value” functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent’s motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent’s motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body’s neurophysiological processes.

The enactive account of motivated activity and the hard problem of efficacy (HPE): Artificial life meets the physics of life

“…This call aligns with a recent proposal to advance the enactive approach to motivated activity by operationalizing an agent's motivational involvement in the generation of its behavior in terms of increased entropy production (Barrett, 2020a(Barrett, , 2020bSwenson, 2020). Froese (2023) responded with an analysis of the motivational involvement as associated with an increase in the underdetermination of that activity's constitutive material processes. The burst of underdetermined activity is called an "irruption" and it is argued to be approximately measurable by means of the resulting increase in fluctuations, specifically with information-theoretic measures of entropy.…”

“…In the following section we will present the irruption theory (Froese, 2023) as a development of the enactive approach to motivated activity that is broadly consistent with these criteria.…”

“…What this equivocal explanatory stance seems to suggest is that the enactive approach is struggling with how to integrate two opposing commitments regarding its conception of life, namely, to allow that both an agent's intrinsic perspective and its external embodiment jointly make a difference to behavior. A detailed assessment of this apparent tension has already been provided elsewhere (Froese, 2023), so the following will be a brief recap to set the scene for the rest of this analysis.…”

On motivating irruptions: the need for a multilevel approach at the interface between life and mind

“…Froese' approach is centered in offering a novel, enactive conceptualization of motivated activity, such that the role of motivations is considered, and they are not left to the status of mere epiphenomena. Froese (2023) refers to this approach as a "motivation-involving" (p. 17) account of motivated activity, which is proposed as advancing an enactive account in line with the libertarian philosophy of freedom and agency. According to it, the motivated activity of an agent is not completely determined by her material embodiment but also irreducibly caused by her motivations.…”

“…As mentioned, the main task of explaining how motivated behavior is non-random even if it is materially underdetermined is placed in the third thesis of attunement. Although Froese (2023) mentions various promising models that could ground and further develop the attunement thesis, such as the embodied approach to habits (Ramírez-Vizcaya & Froese, 2020), implicit body memory (Froese & Izquierdo, 2018), and meta-stable attunement (Bruineberg et al, 2021), he favors the selfoptimization model of adaptivity and regulation (Froese et al, 2023). The latter proposes that a system, such as a neural network, can spontaneously optimize its internal organization to better satisfy its constraints over time (i.e., solve a "constraint satisfaction" problem).…”