Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Behavioral integration — how an organism’s many control systems come to act as one — action selection and competition between systems (habitual and goal-directed, automatic and willed), hierarchical and feedback control, intertemporal conflict and self-control, and evidence accumulation to a decision. One of four unities kept apart (ADR-024).
15 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-033 v2 | In a system described at more than one level, does “who drives?” have an answer at a given level, and what kinds of answer are there? | The owner’s agency question of 2026-10-11, which follows from the threshold criterion (QUESTION-035): once a combined form is one system, which part or level, if any, drives it? The owner proposes a spectrum of kinds (top-down, bidirectional, emergent) and holds that the answer changes over time. It sharpens QUESTION-009 by asking about drive before asking about agency. | Open |
| QUESTION-034 | If an agent is a population of interests, what makes it act as one: bargaining among the interests, a change in which of them may act, or agreement among them? | The owner’s prompt of 2026-10-11: the self as a multi-agent system, connected to synchronization through temporal discounting, mindfulness and flow. It sharpens QUESTION-015 for the case the record already reads as a population (THEORY-067) and asks whether the three are three routes to integration, distinguished by what each does to the crossing of the interests’ valuations. Open: every answer filed is Proposed. | Open |
| QUESTION-054 | Is there a governing level among an agent’s regimes, a system that specifies control apart from the systems that carry it out, or is governance the interaction of the regimes themselves? | An unmarked tension among THEORYs the record holds, raised by the synthesis review of 2026-10-11. THEORY-056 (emotion regulation is one motive state checking another) and THEORY-062 (control follows relative reliability, not a supervisor) deny a separate regulator. THEORY-070 (the expected value of control is computed in a distinct specification system) asserts one. CLAIM-025 and CLAIM-099 speak of a governing organization among regimes, so the answer matters to this line. | Open |
| QUESTION-062 | Within a single decision, does a goal govern which response becomes effective by setting the terms of the competition among responses (threshold, starting point, inhibition) rather than by selecting one? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-027, CLAIM-122 and QUESTION-054. THEORY-061, THEORY-068 and THEORY-059 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-077 | Is agreement among an agent’s interests produced by coupling, as when each sees and follows the current majority, a different kind of integration from agreement because their valuations coincide? | Drawn by the assistant from CASE-074 and filed at the owner’s request. A crowd that can see its running vote tally comes to agree by herding, and its members’ preferences need not change. CLAIM-162 defines synchronization as valuations that coincide. The question is whether agreement by coupling is a third route to acting as one, beside agreement by coinciding valuation (flow) and a change in which interest may act (CLAIM-156). | Open |
| QUESTION-078 v2 | If an agent’s interests need not synchronize to act as one, can differentiated interests keep distinct roles, boundaries and pathways of influence within a stable or metastable pattern of coordination, and what collective variable would show it? | From an interlocutor’s reading of LIT-638 against CLAIM-163, relayed by the owner on 2026-10-12: whether integration of an agent’s interests is synchronization or coordination of differentiated parts. It refines QUESTION-034 and bears on CLAIM-162 and CLAIM-163. Filed as advice. | Open |
| QUESTION-079 | Is the coordination among an agent’s regimes better described by discrete switches between metastable states or by continuous reorganization, and does the answer change what would count as a transition in the test of the synchronization objection? | From an interlocutor’s reading of LIT-638 against CLAIM-163, relayed by the owner on 2026-10-12: whether coordination is discrete switching or continuous reorganization, which decides what CLAIM-163’s transition test should look for. LIT-638 and LIT-080 are rivals on it. Filed as advice. | Open |
| QUESTION-088 v3 | Does modelling psychological organization as processes that allocate influence to one another predict habit, rumination, rigidity, akrasia and insight better, with one shared set of organizational variables, than models built for each phenomenon or around a central executive? | The owner’s standalone question at U5: “do we gain something just by framing a ‘self’ this way?” A5 and A10 (its Q5) made it a test of explanatory compression. It refines QUESTION-056, which asks whether such a description implements the will-organization account or replaces it. This asks whether it predicts anything. CLAIM-024’s objection, that every mechanism has its own literature, applies here too. | Open |
| QUESTION-090 | Under what conditions does a population of heterogeneous processes develop a self-maintaining, internally differentiated governance structure that acts coherently without suppressing the plurality of processes it emerges from? | A4’s closing question, which the owner at U5 called “a great formulation of the question”. It is QUESTION-034 asked of a population whose members allocate authority to one another, and it adds two conditions 034 leaves implicit: that the governance maintain itself, and that coherence not be bought by eliminating the members’ disagreement. An answer names conditions under which both hold and conditions under which one fails. | Open |
| QUESTION-304 | Does acting as one require that an agent’s interests synchronize? | The first side of QUESTION-078, split off by the ninth status review under ADR-049 because CLAIM-261 (Active) settles it: no. An agent acting under internal conflict acts as one while its interests stay divided, which TERM-050 calls integration by arbitration. Whether differentiated interests keep distinct roles, boundaries and pathways in a stable pattern of coordination, and what collective variable would show it, stays QUESTION-078’s. | Answered |
| QUESTION-308 | Do the process effects of implementation intentions, the immediacy, efficiency under load and running without conscious intent of the planned response and the better detection of its cue, survive correction for publication bias or preregistered replication, and do they mediate goal attainment rather than merely accompany it? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-913, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-913 to what the 2006 meta-analysis’s small, uncorrected pools showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the effects are as large as reported, and whether they carry the effect on goal attainment, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-309 | Within one design, do contingent if-then plans outperform schedule plans for the same goal, sample and outcome, does recording the plan weaken it, and does rehearsal work through the accessibility of the cue or the strength of the cue–response link? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-908, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-908 to the between-test differences the 2024 meta-analysis measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether format, rehearsal and recording cause those differences is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-310 | Does the effect of forming implementation intentions stay reliably above zero, and of the same small order, once tests published after September 2019 are added or preregistered multi-site replications are run with correction for publication bias, and does it hold outside the lab and online? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-918, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-918 to what the 2024 meta-analysis measured to September 2019, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the corrected effect holds in later and registered evidence is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-314 | Is the response an implementation intention specifies gated by the goal intention it serves, so that with the goal deactivated or weak the cue alone does not produce it, and does the gate survive the plan’s being acted on many times? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-904, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-904 to what Gollwitzer and Sheeran concluded and what the 2024 moderator measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The authors conclude the gate from a handful of studies; whether a crossed test shows it, and whether it survives repetition, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-365 | When a conflict among an agent’s processes is settled neither by local accommodation nor by escalation, can it be settled by another organization taking up the demand the agent’s arbitration leaves ungranted, and what would tell that apart from suppression of the demand or a change in the agent’s own arbitration? | Filed 2026-10-31 from Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024) and Bencherki (2017), after Simondon. The record settles conflict among an agent’s processes in two ways, locally or by escalation (CLAIM-358), and holds conflict to be the gap between the precedence a motive claims and the authority it is granted (CLAIM-484). The readings propose a third: the ungranted demand is taken up by a collective the agent joins or forms. The record has no place for it, because its account of will is indexed to a given agent (CLAIM-080). | Open |