On the spatiotemporal extensiveness of sense-making: ultrafast cognition and the historicity of normativity

Mojica, Laura; Froese, Tom

doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02240-7

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Rather, our embodiment is shaped by its history of interactions to such an extent that the body is capable of appropriate movements for most situations. Work on "ultrafast cognition" demonstrates that not even feedback loops are needed for meaningful responses [97]. One possibility is to cash out more sophisticated forms of attunement, such as a tendency toward optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances, using a suitably adjusted version of the free energy principle [98].…”

Section: Attunement Thesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Froese

2023

Entropy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Attunement Thesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Froese

2023

Entropy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This concept has the advantage that it avoids the traditional problem of accounting for a direct causal link from mind to matter, for example from intention to action. Instead, to account for the normally close fit of bodily action to mental intention, it appeals to a process of attunement [18]: the history of agent-environment interaction, in combination with a suitable notion of plasticity, can serve as the basis for explaining the otherwise surprising appropriateness of our actions [26]. In other words, the role of irruptions is simply to indirectly widen the space of action possibilities, while the process of action selection is offloaded into the self-organizing propensities of our body and affordances of the environment [27].…”

Section: Mental Causationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Irruption and Absorption: A ‘Black-Box’ Framework for How Mind and Matter Make a Difference to Each Other

Froese

2024

Entropy

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind–body problem. Most prominent is the problem of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness, which can be generalized into the hard problem of agential efficacy and the hard problem of mental content. Here, it is proposed to accept these explanatory gaps at face value and to take them as positive indications of a complex relation: mind and matter are one, but they are not the same. They are related in an efficacious yet non-reducible, non-observable, and even non-intelligible manner. Natural science is well equipped to handle the effects of non-observables, and so the mind is treated as equivalent to a hidden ‘black box’ coupled to the body. Two concepts are introduced given that there are two directions of coupling influence: (1) irruption denotes the unobservable mind hiddenly making a difference to observable matter, and (2) absorption denotes observable matter hiddenly making a difference to the unobservable mind. The concepts of irruption and absorption are methodologically compatible with existing information-theoretic approaches to neuroscience, such as measuring cognitive activity and subjective qualia in terms of entropy and compression, respectively. By offering novel responses to otherwise intractable theoretical problems from first principles, and by doing so in a way that is closely connected with empirical advances, irruption theory is poised to set the agenda for the future of the mind sciences.

show abstract

“…It is often assumed that relevant action requires a forward-looking central controller, but it does not necessarily depend on a representation of future possibilities. Rather, the Attunement Thesis holds that, essentially, our embodiment has been shaped by its history of interactions to such an extent that the body is capable of appropriate movements for most situations, so much so that even feedback loops are often not needed (Mojica & Froese, 2021). One possibility is to cash out more sophisticated forms of attunement, such as a tendency toward optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances simultaneously, using a suitably adjusted version of the Free Energy Principle (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014).…”

Section: Attunement Thesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Irruption Theory: A novel conceptualization of the enactive account of motivated activity

Froese¹

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

All human affairs assume a priori that people are conscious agents—that our subjectively lived perspective genuinely makes a difference to behavior. Yet natural science has been in apparent tension with this genuine subjectivity, because in principle nothing but material processes are measurable in our bodies. Standard theories of consciousness further obscure its genuine role—and ultimately undermine their own coherence—by directly identifying it with material processes. However, the tension is avoidable because a complete account of material processes is also fundamentally impossible. I propose an alternative framework centered on the consequent prospect that the role of consciousness is related to this material underdetermination of our living embodiment. Specifically, I introduce the concept of irruption to operationalize the uncertainty in measurement resulting from a person’s exercise of conscious agency: increased subjective involvement in embodied action is indirectly observable as increased underdetermination of the body’s physiological processes, akin to decreased physical constraints. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not entail random behavior; rather, they can facilitate behavioral switching and the self-organization of an implicit capacity for generalization, as indicated by models of complex adaptive systems. An approximate information-theoretic measure of irruptions is entropy, including in brain activity, which makes it intelligible why increased neural entropy is associated with consciousness, cognition, and agency. The upshot is that we are conscious agents who can make an effective difference to our embodied actions, yet without being able (nor needing) to directly control our body’s material processes.

show abstract

On the spatiotemporal extensiveness of sense-making: ultrafast cognition and the historicity of normativity

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

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

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

Irruption and Absorption: A ‘Black-Box’ Framework for How Mind and Matter Make a Difference to Each Other

Irruption Theory: A novel conceptualization of the enactive account of motivated activity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About