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.
Embodied cognition — cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted or extended — enactivism and sense-making, coordination dynamics, situated robotics, and mind as organism–environment coupling (group: philosophy; ADR-025).
31 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-069 v4 | Rhythmic bimanual coordination switches from anti-phase to in-phase through a nonequilibrium phase transition in relative phase, captured by the HKB equation, with critical fluctuations and critical slowing as early warning | Kelso’s 2021 retrospective (LIT-601) states the Haken–Kelso–Bunz model: relative phase φ between the hands obeys dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ, so in-phase and anti-phase are both stable for b/a > 1/4 and anti-phase loses stability below it as movement speeds up. With noise the switch is a nonequilibrium phase transition, and the reported data show enhanced fluctuations and critical slowing before it. Many effectors act as one through a collective variable, with no controller choosing the pattern. Proposed, because the relaxation-time and hysteresis data are not read first-hand. | Proposed |
| THEORY-071 v3 | Minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and self-generated normativity, and individuality without the other two is not agency | Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), LIT-566, read in NOTE-458. The three conditions are that the system distinguishes itself from its environment with no observer doing it, that it is the active source of modulations of its coupling with the environment, and that it regulates that coupling against norms its own organisation sets. Each is necessary, and together they are claimed to be sufficient. Individuality is the precondition of the other two and does not suffice. A cell in passive osmosis, a kitten warmed by its mother and a person with a Parkinsonian tremor are each individuals, and none of them is acting. The generative definition is an open autonomous organisation that adaptively modulates its coupling so as to maintain itself. Here “autonomy” and “self” mean organisational closure. They do not mean a subject or self-governance. Proposed: a conceptual analysis checked against intuitive cases, with an asymmetry criterion its authors call incomplete. | Proposed |
| THEORY-221 v2 | Organizational closure is a circular organization of efficient causes by which a system produces the conditions of its own existence, distinct from feedback, self-organization and catalytic cycles; systems whose loops do not regenerate the constraints that make them possible approximate closure without instantiating it | Rubin, Roli, Stano & Damiano (2026), LIT-1027, read in NOTE-727. A genealogy of closure notions from logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition, and an interpretive thesis drawn from it. The genealogy shows that “closure” names different things (information, operations, efficient causes, constraints, catalysts). The thesis picks efficient causes, adds that closure so read cannot be exhaustively described as a state-determined syntactic procedure, and concludes that current AI, agentic LLM systems included, is heteronomous. Proposed: the thesis is an interpretation, the irreducibility rests on Rosen’s unassessed arguments and a halting-problem argument the authors call provisional, and the AI verdict is drawn from the definition, not from analysis of any system. | Proposed |
| THEORY-302 | Coordinated action is controlled by tuning relatively autonomous coordinative structures, not by commanding muscles: a higher level specifies an equivalence class of acceptable states and sets the parameters of self-regulating units, leaving the realized details to them | Turvey (1977; read in the 1975 Haskins report), LIT-904, read in NOTE-826. Argued from Bernstein’s degrees-of-freedom problem and Greene’s equivalence classes, and supported at the spinal level by reflex-probe studies showing the segmental apparatus retuned in the tens of milliseconds before voluntary movement, and by Fel’dman’s joint that goes to a preset equilibrium whatever its initial conditions. Its extension to all levels, and to tuning set directly by vision, is the author’s speculation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-334 v2 | In copying a pattern of coloured blocks that stays in view, seven subjects told to work quickly looked back at the model about 1.3 times per block, and their commonest cycle, which looks at the model both before picking up a block and before dropping it, was the slowest per block in the authors’ observed tallies (about 3 s, against 1.5 s for a cycle that copies from memory); looks fell to 1.0 per block with model and copy 70° apart and to 0.7 with one-colour patterns that could be chunked, and in three subjects a colour change made during a saccade raised fixation time by about 129 ms after pickup against about 50 ms before; no statistics are reported | Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook and Rao (1997), LIT-1075, read in NOTE-883. Fixations are modelled as pointers that bind a program’s variable to a place in the world, so that only the task-relevant feature is fetched, just before use. In block copying, look-model, pick-up, look-model, drop was the commonest cycle (about 43% of cycles), at about 3 s a block against 1.5 s from memory; 70° separation cut looks from 1.3 to 1.0 per block, and one-colour patterns to 0.7. A colour changed mid-saccade mostly went unnoticed and cost time only once colour was held. The “carrying cost” of working memory is inferred from choice, not measured, and what is left in the world is raw input, not a computed result. Promoted 2026-10-20 on the observations alone (ADR-047 v3). | Active |
| THEORY-343 | In laboratory choice tasks, people offload cognition more as a task’s internal demand rises, but the choice follows their evaluation of the demand rather than its benefit: they offload where it gives no gain and more when less confident at equal ability, and offloading can lower memory for what was offloaded | Risko & Gilbert (2016), LIT-1059, read in NOTE-887. A review: in choice/no-choice studies of rotated displays, delayed intentions and short-term memory, spontaneous offloading rises with internal demand, but it also occurs where it gives no gain (writing items down about 40% of the time at a two-item load already at ceiling), rises with lower confidence after ability is controlled, and differs between displays of equal measured demand. Expecting to have a result stored externally went with poorer memory for it. The review reports no effect sizes, the cited studies were not read, and its metacognitive model is an unformalised box diagram; the drift toward external reliance is a prediction, not a finding. | Proposed |
| THEORY-346 | When information stays in view at a known place, people consult it less and rely on memory more as the time to reach it rises, in a graded trend across added delays from 0 to 3.2 seconds, even where the memory is weak and the display perfect; in one copying task a model that prices memory and display access in time alone, with no preference for either source, fits how many items people encode per look | Gray, Sims, Fu and Schoelles (2006), LIT-1073, read in NOTE-868, and Gray and Fu (2004), LIT-1058, read in NOTE-864. Adding a click to reach on-screen show information cut how often it was checked, and checks of finished settings came from memory. Lockouts of 0 to 3,200 ms on a Blocks World pattern cut looks and raised blocks placed per look, with linear trends. An ideal performer model with ACT-R memory equations and Q-learning on time alone fits four measures. That the control system has no bias toward the world is argued, not tested against a rival model. Errors in the 2004 study differed only against a group that memorized under several other changes, and the 2006 model has no wrong retrievals, no precomputation, no reuse across trials and no staleness. | Active |
| THEORY-351 v2 | In a two-pilot airliner cockpit, setting the approach speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicators, prepared 25 to 30 minutes ahead in a low-workload phase from a card selected by the displayed gross weight, turns recall and scale reading at the moment of use into a judgement of spatial proximity, so the cockpit system remembers the speeds without either pilot’s memory being improved; this is argued by task analysis of mandated procedure, not measured | Hutchins (1995), LIT-1066, read in NOTE-867. A stylized task analysis of one airline’s MD-80 procedure, informed by observation but reporting no measurements. The speed-card booklet, filtered by the displayed gross weight, is the system’s long-term memory; the values pass through speech to bugs on two airspeed indicators, and on approach the pilots judge the needle’s nearness to a bug instead of recalling and reading speeds. The paper concludes that the memory is “not made primarily of pilot memory”. It analyses only success, for an anticipated, mandated and invariant task with a few values needed in a fixed order, so it says nothing about search for one item among many under a deadline. Cognition in the Wild (LIT-1060) is Unavailable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-355 | Agents arrange their surroundings so that perception and choice take the place of internal search, changing how much thinking a task needs without changing what can physically be done; the set-up is paid once and recovered over the later choice points the arrangement serves, so an arrangement whose scope is the whole task can repay a large set-up and a narrow one must repay within the next few actions, and the arrangement decays unless maintained; the savings are argued and piloted, not measured | Kirsh (1995), LIT-1076, read in NOTE-871, and Kirsh (1996), LIT-1057, read in NOTE-872. From video of cooks, assemblers and baggers and from informal observation, Kirsh classifies arrangements that simplify choice, perception and internal computation, frames their savings in search-complexity terms, and ties set-up cost to the number of choice points an arrangement serves. The 1996 paper adds a verbal investment rule with an interest factor for risk, one risk being that the change is not still present later, and upkeep against scatter. Neither paper gives a cost model or a measured saving; the 1995 paper says the savings do not “in general” admit meaningful quantitative estimation, and the 1996 paper puts mental cost outside its formalism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-360 v2 | In Kirsh and Maglio’s Tetris keystroke data, rotation began in earnest by 400 to 600 ms after a piece appeared, sometimes before it was fully in view, and at each of three skill levels drops preceded by a move to the wall and back were longer than ordinary drops, about 19 to 20 squares against 13 to 16 | Kirsh and Maglio (1994), LIT-1054, read in NOTE-878, with Kirsh (1995), LIT-1076, read in NOTE-871. In Tetris keystroke data, pieces are rotated more than plan-then-act would need, rotation starts by 400–600 ms, and a translate-to-wall check precedes longer drops. The authors define an epistemic action as one whose primary function is to cut the space, time or unreliability of the agent’s own computation, and argue these moves are of that kind. The saving is argued from a three-player pilot comparing physical with mental rotation, not measured in performance. The trade is offloading at the moment of use, once, with nothing stored; the paper sets itself against caching. Promoted 2026-10-20 on the timing and Table 1 alone (ADR-047 v3); the epistemic-action reading is held as THEORY-823. | Active |
| THEORY-461 | If a substantial class of mental states, interoceptive, affective, perceptual and bodily-agentive, depends on an animate body, then today’s text-only chatbots lack them and their self-ascriptions of such states are systematically untrue, and users can engage them without false belief by make-believe, as a new kind of interactive, self-involving and blended fictional character | Roberts (2026), LIT-207, read in NOTE-157. The anti-realist half is a valid conditional whose antecedent, moderate embodied cognition, is assumed at prima facie strength. It covers body-dependent states only; footnote 8 allows realism about the chatbot as a disembodied thinker, so belief and reasoning are untouched. The fictionalist half shows the attitude permissible and apt, not required, and offers no evidence that users hold it. It is not a general denial that chatbots have minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-512 | The extended-mind thesis worth disputing is that external entities partly constitute a subject’s mental states in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them; so stated it can reach standing belief but not consciousness, if consciousness needs information directly available for global control, since perception makes availability indirect | Chalmers (2019), LIT-415, read in NOTE-356, and his foreword to Clark’s book (2008), LIT-421, read in NOTE-369. The 1998 thesis is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that its critics accept, so the controversial thesis is constitution through perception and action. The perception-action boundary is then the strongest objection, met by revisionism, not refuted. Consciousness does not extend this way, on an imported criterion (direct availability, “not mediated by other mental states”) and on the absence of any working twin case. Both halves are proposals defended against a few cases; the criterion is the author’s earlier correlate of consciousness, not an argument made here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-520 | When coordination between two autonomous agents and the continuation of their encounter shape each other, the interaction gains an autonomy of its own, a precarious self-sustaining organization that lasts only while both agents stay autonomous; coordinating movement then coordinates sense-making, so some social understanding, such as recognising a partner, is a property of the interaction’s dynamics and not of either individual | De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), LIT-571, read in NOTE-456. A conceptual account built on coordination dynamics, with illustrative evidence: the corridor, charades, mother–infant timing and the perceptual-crossing experiments of Auvray et al., reported, not new. NOTE-456 declined a THEORY because the source carries no claim beyond its definition. The claim with some support is the perceptual-crossing one; the autonomy of the interaction is a definition, and the implications are called “speculative at this stage” by the authors. | Proposed |
| THEORY-528 | The cases offered for extended cognition are explained at least as well by embedded cognition, on which the organism leans heavily on external props, and memory research finds that external stores lack the interference, generation effect and power-law learning and forgetting of internal memory, so a kind spanning both does no explanatory work and conservatism favours the embedded account | Rupert (2004), LIT-422, read in NOTE-343. The past-endorsement dilemma is strong: without it, directory assistance makes Otto believe every listed number; with it, the organism’s endorsement is the final authority. The memory comparisons are moderate: the internal side is cited research, the external side is thought experiment, and no experiment on an external store is run or cited. The step from “different fine-grained kinds” to “no useful coarse kind” is a challenge plus conservatism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-579 v2 | If belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and a parity principle the authors state rather than argue | Clark & Chalmers (1998), LIT-097, read in NOTE-180, with Clark’s reply to the critics (2005), LIT-403, read in NOTE-363. Otto’s notebook plays for him the role Inga’s memory plays for her, so on role-functionalism it carries his standing belief, and Twin Otto, a duplicate from the skin in, believes otherwise. The constitutive step is carried by role-functionalism, the parity sentence and explanatory simplicity, none of them defended; the four coupling features mark a clear case and are explicitly not necessary and sufficient. Proposed: the step from causal coupling to parthood is the open point. The thesis is about vehicles of standing beliefs, not about consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-582 | Causal coupling between a process and something outside it does not by itself make that thing part of the process, so an argument from coupling to extended cognition needs a further premise saying what makes a process cognitive | Adams & Aizawa (2001), LIT-438, read in NOTE-368, and their reply to Clark (2010, read from a draft), LIT-455, read in NOTE-380. A thermostat’s bimetallic strip, the kidney’s filtration and a nerve at a neuromuscular junction are each coupled to more than themselves, and their processes do not extend. The 2010 text names the inference the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. The point is that coupling does not entail parthood. It is not shown that coupling never accompanies parthood, nor that the extended-mind authors relied on coupling alone. | Active |
| THEORY-591 | Cognition has two necessary marks, involving non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal processing, and as a contingent fact only processes in the brain have both, so notebooks, screens and tools coupled to a thinker are not parts of cognition, and human-plus-tool systems will support no science of their own | Adams & Aizawa (2001), LIT-438, read in NOTE-368, restated against Clark in 2010, LIT-455, read in NOTE-380 from a draft. Both marks are assumed: the first on a claimed consensus, the second on how mature sciences individuate kinds. The authors grant the parity principle and that cognition could extend; the claim is that it does not. The “no science of tool use” half is offered as a bet. Rupert, the other critic, rejects the derived-content argument as question-begging. | Proposed |
| THEORY-628 v2 | Self-production alone gives a system only an all-or-nothing norm, to go on or to die, and that distinction is available to an observer, not to the system; a graded norm the system itself has, by which viable states are better or worse for it, needs adaptivity, a further capacity to detect tendencies toward the boundary of its viability and to act so as to reverse them, and sense-making and agency need adaptivity | Di Paolo (2005), LIT-1017, read in full in NOTE-719. A conceptual argument against Weber and Varela: autopoiesis in its original formulation entails conservation, not active homeostasis, so a bacterium whose intake is below consumption does not seek food “just because” it is autopoietic, and balancing at a cliff edge and falling over it both conserve autopoiesis. Adaptivity is defined, graded and recursive; pathology becomes failure of adaptivity while autopoiesis continues. There is no formal model, and the viability set is defined in one sentence. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-666 | A system that produces itself, a network of production that regenerates the components which produce it and constitute it as a distinguishable unity, has by that fact an intrinsic purpose, the maintenance of its identity, and with it a point of view, valence and a world as distinct from an environment, so that teleology in organisms is real and not an observer’s as-if; the account is stated for the cell, and a multicellular organism is not itself autopoietic | Weber & Varela (2002), LIT-1018, read in full in NOTE-720. An essay of exegesis and convergence: Kant’s natural purposes read non-reductively, Jonas’s metabolism-based philosophy of the organism, and autopoiesis. The step from self-production to purpose is asserted (“Bluntly stated”), the step to subjectivity is Jonas’s phenomenological inversion, and no observable is proposed for the “empirical feature” the conclusion claims. What sets autopoiesis apart from dissipative structures is placed in “concern”, not in organisation. One paragraph runs from self-maintenance to a right to life. | Proposed |
| THEORY-765 v2 | Brushing a seen rubber hand in synchrony with the hidden real hand makes touch be felt at the rubber hand, makes it be reported as one’s own, and shifts the felt position of the real hand toward it; a small asynchrony removes these effects | Botvinick & Cohen (1998), LIT-1277, read in full in NOTE-1006. Ten subjects affirmed referred touch and ownership after ten minutes of synchronous brushing; after thirty minutes their blind reaches drifted toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion was reported; asynchronous brushing cut both. It does not show that synchrony alone, apart from expectation, produces the report, and it concerns a hand, not the whole body or the self. | Rejected — Rejected on 2026-10-20 by its own refutation condition: drift toward the rubber hand appeared as strongly under asynchronous brushing interrupted by pauses, and with the hand only seen (Rohde et al. 2011, LIT-1281). Its suggestion control was also too weak to separate perception from expectation (Lush & Seth 2022, LIT-1267). The report half is restated, narrower, in THEORY-766. |
| THEORY-766 v2 | Brushing a seen rubber hand in synchrony with the hidden real hand, against asynchronous brushing, raises reports that touch is felt at the rubber hand and, more weakly and less reliably, that the rubber hand is one’s own; the proprioceptive drift toward the rubber hand that accompanies these reports is not a measure of them; the standard comparison conditions do not equalise participants’ expectations, so whether the stimulation or the expectation produces the report difference is open | Botvinick & Cohen (1998) and four replications read here give a synchrony effect on reports of referred touch and ownership. Rohde et al. (2011) and Abdulkarim & Ehrsson (2016) separate drift from ownership. The suggestion debate (Lush 2020; Lush et al. 2020; Ehrsson et al. 2022; Lush & Seth 2022; Roseboom & Lush 2022) shows that the standard controls do not equalise expectations. The ownership report is weaker than the referred-touch report and tracks trait suggestibility. Whether the synchronous stimulation, not expectation, produces the report difference is not settled. Promoted 2026-10-20 on the report differences measured (ADR-047 v3); the perceptual reading is THEORY-827. | Active |
| THEORY-767 v2 | Body ownership draws on interoceptive as well as exteroceptive signals: a visual cue synchronous with one’s heartbeat increases ownership of a virtual hand and identification with a virtual body, and lower interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion | Seth (2013), LIT-1263, read in full in NOTE-1000. An opinion article that reports, at second hand, that a virtual hand pulsing with the heartbeat was owned more (Suzuki et al. 2013, the author’s own group), that a virtual body pulsing with it was identified with more (Aspell et al. 2013), and that people with lower heartbeat-detection sensitivity are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion (Tsakiris et al. 2011). None of the studies was read here, and no control separates the heartbeat from any other periodic signal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-823 | Tetris players rotate pieces more often than planning a placement and then executing it would require, rotate them early and check the column more the higher the drop, because these moves are epistemic actions: physical action that stands in for mental computation at the moment of use | Kirsh and Maglio (1994), LIT-1054, read in full in NOTE-878, with Kirsh (1995), LIT-1076, read in NOTE-871, argue that the extra, early and checking moves of Tetris players are epistemic actions: physical moves whose primary function is to cut the space, time or unreliability of the player’s own computation. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-360, only the early-rotation timing and the drop-length difference after the wall check. Over-rotation and the rise of the check with drop height rest on figures without printed numbers, and the saving is argued from a three-player pilot, not measured. Filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-827 | The rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven by multisensory integration: the difference in reports between synchronous and asynchronous brushing is produced by the stimulation, not by participants’ expectations | Ehrsson et al. (2022), LIT-1264, read in NOTE-997, conclude that the rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms (NOTE-997, C8), from the synchrony difference’s independence of hypnotisability in Lush et al.’s 353 participants. Lush and Seth’s reply, LIT-1267, shows that uniform but unequal expectations predict the same null. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-766, only the report differences and that the standard controls do not equalise expectations. This is the perceptual reading, filed under ADR-047 v4 when that narrowing set it aside. | Proposed |
| THEORY-874 | Whether a view of mind is organicist or informationalist is a dimension orthogonal to whether it is cognitivist or embodied, and the enactive approach of The Embodied Mind is set apart from other embodied views by organicism with experiential primacy and reciprocity, not by sensorimotor emphasis | Ward (2026), LIT-1356, read in the accepted manuscript in NOTE-1065. Views differ on where cognition’s processes are (skull or brain–body–world) and, separately, on what the meaning of mental states depends on (information, or organization distinctive of the living). Embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism and cybernetics are embodied and informationalist; the enactive approach is organicist, and further marked by experiential primacy and reciprocity. The sharp edge: it is a taxonomy argued from examples and exegesis. It does not argue that organicism is true, and the line between distinctive and characteristic properties of life is left without a criterion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-876 | Phenomenal consciousness is the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative model of its sensorium, coherent in space, time and cause and run either coupled to sense data (perception) or decoupled from it (imagination); embodied grounding, the model’s capacity to inform and be informed by action–perception cycles at behavioural timescales and the history of such coupling by which it was learned, is necessary, so that integrated information or a functional global workspace without it does not suffice | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee (2026), LIT-1345, read in full in NOTE-1057: Integrated World Modeling Theory as restated in a symposium paper, whose earlier, fuller statements (Safron 2020–2023) were not read. Asserted, not argued here. The sharp edge is that the theory does not require current sensory coupling, so its quarrel with grounding- free accounts is about developmental grounding and the capacity for coupling. “Embodied grounding” comes in “sufficient degrees (and kinds)”, with no threshold. | Proposed |
| THEORY-891 v2 | In dyads of untrained dancers facing each other, shared music and visual contact each raised interpersonal movement synchrony, with no interaction detected, in different movement components: lateral and hand movements synchronized through seeing the partner, anteroposterior movements such as head bobs through the shared music, and vertical bounce through both; which factor drove a component’s synchrony was classified from its spatial direction and not from the periodicity of the synchrony | Bigand, Bianco, Abalde & Novembre (2024), LIT-1424, read in full in NOTE-1093 from PubMed Central. A 2 × 2 within-dyad experiment, 35 dyads, that removes the shared external drive and the coupling channel independently and finds synchrony from each in different components, no interaction, and a timing signature that cannot tell them apart. It answers QUESTION-063 in part: separate interventions on drive and channel do discriminate, and a timing-only measure does not. Direction of coupling, and a perturbation of one member, are not in it. | Active |
| THEORY-1119 | Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde propose that minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and normativity set by the system’s own organisation, each necessary and together, they say, sufficient; that individuality without the other two is not agency; and that a system optimizing an externally fixed function is not a model of agency | What the paper proposes, split from THEORY-071 by the tenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern, so that claims needing only the proposal can stand on it. The paper was read in full (NOTE-458), so the reading of what it proposes is held. Whether the definition is right, which turns on an asymmetry criterion its authors call incomplete and on applying the conditions to explicit models, stays THEORY-071’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1166 | Di Paolo argues that autopoiesis as originally defined entails conservation and not active homeostasis, so it gives a system only an all-or-nothing norm, to go on or to die, which an observer and not the system can use; that a graded norm the system itself has needs adaptivity, a capacity to detect tendencies toward the boundary of its viability and to act so as to reverse them; and that sense-making and agency need adaptivity | What the paper argues, split from THEORY-628 by the twelfth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern, so that claims needing only the argument can stand on it. The paper was read in full (NOTE-719), so the reading of what it argues is held. Whether the argument is right stays THEORY-628’s question, Proposed. It turns on three things: a reading of autopoietic theory that Di Paolo grants later formulations may not share (note 1), cases chosen to illustrate it, and its rival THEORY-666. | Active |
| THEORY-1194 | Clark and Chalmers argue that if belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so that the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and on a parity principle they state rather than argue | What the extended-mind paper argues, split from THEORY-579 by the sixteenth status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern (ADR-058’s route), so that CLAIM-175, which argues “on the extended-mind thesis’s own terms”, can stand on the statement of those terms. Both papers were read in full (NOTE-180, NOTE-363), and Clark (2005) says in his own words that the parity principle was not argued. Whether the conditional holds, that coupling of this kind makes a store part of a mind, stays THEORY-579’s question, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1227 | Haken, Kelso and Bunz model the switch of rhythmic bimanual coordination from anti-phase to in-phase at a critical frequency as the loss of one stable state of an order parameter, relative phase, derived from two coupled oscillators; Kelso, Scholz and Schöner report the variability of relative phase rising before the switch in the anti-phase pattern only, in a few subjects and with no statistical test | What the Haken–Kelso–Bunz paper proposes and what the first report of critical fluctuations measured, split from THEORY-069 by the twenty-third status review on THEORY-1110’s pattern (ADR-058, ADR-065), so that a claim needing only the model and that report can stand on it. Both papers are read in full (NOTE-1424, NOTE-1433). Whether the switch is a nonequilibrium phase transition with critical slowing and hysteresis as its warning signs, which needs relaxation-time and hysteresis data neither paper shows, stays THEORY-069’s question, Proposed. | Active |