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LIT-1950: Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1521), from PubMed Central's copy of the version of record; worth reading as the founding statement of Irruption Theory, a libertarian enactivist account on which motivation shows only as material underdetermination, and for its own concession that irruptions are undirected and that direction comes from attunement. Conceptual: it has no model or data of its own.
Version2
Tagsagency, complex-systems
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1521 — Froese — Irruption Theory
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1302 — Sánchez-Cañizares reinterprets Irruption Theory for binary decisions (IAT*): irruption is the onset of a landscape with one attractor per option and absorption the passage to a single attractor, both correlated in mind and brain, reversing the sign of Froese's variance hypothesis; the mind's causal role is to set the landscape's control parameters by "selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining", not to push the state, so on this account the mind controls which outcomes exist and not which one the state reaches, THEORY-1321 — Froese proposes that irruptions combined with attunement, modelled on Watson et al.'s self-optimization of a Hopfield network by occasional resets to arbitrary states plus Hebbian learning, answer the libertarian's randomness challenge, how behaviour can be effective though underdetermined; but in the model offered the resets are arbitrary, so what makes the behaviour effective is the learned attractor landscape, and nothing in it distinguishes a motivated irruption from noise, THEORY-1348 — In Froese's Irruption Theory an agent's motivations make a difference to behaviour only as an increase in its material underdetermination, measurable at best indirectly as neural or behavioural entropy, and such irruptions are by the theory's own terms undirected: scaled up by chaos, 1/f noise or criticality, they loosen the current organization but "cannot force the formation of the behavior that is to come", so the theory places behaviour's direction in the body's attunement and not in the irruption

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Froese, T. (2023). Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity. Entropy, 25(5), 748. doi:10.3390/e25050748.

Key takeaways

Read in full on 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1521).

  • Irruption Theory’s axioms, its three theses and its commitment that irruptions are undirected (THEORY-1348).
  • Its proposed answer to the randomness horn of the libertarian dilemma, attunement by self-optimization, in which the resets are arbitrary (THEORY-1321).
  • A libertarian source that concedes the point of CLAIM-533: amplified indeterminacy “cannot directly control”.

Standing in the record

The source of Irruption Theory, which LIT-1132 and Sánchez-Cañizares 2026 apply.

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