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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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Properties3
StatusActive
Tagsfree-will, agency, complex-systems
SourceLIT-1950 — Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity

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Source

Froese (2023), LIT-1950, §§4–6 of the version of record in PubMed Central (PMC10217218); read in NOTE-1521.

What was actually shown

Nothing empirical: this is what the theory is. Each part is in the text.

  • Axioms (§5.1). Motivations “as such” make a difference to the material basis of behaviour; it is impossible to measure how; behaviour is underdetermined by its material basis.
  • The working hypothesis (§5.2). “The more an agent’s embodied activity is motivated, the less that activity is determined by its material basis.” Effects of motivation “can only be measured indirectly as a special subset of material changes that are not attributable to the activity’s material basis”, for example as entropy of neural signals (§5.2.1).
  • Scalability (§5.2.2). Irruptions are “exceptionally small-scale”, so the body must amplify them: “a poised system such that it amplifies microscopic irruptions to macroscopic fluctuations”. Chaos, 1/f noise, self-organized criticality and workspace ignition are the candidates.
  • No direction (§5.2.3). “Irruptions cannot directly control a motivated activity’s material basis … the changes induced by irruptions are arbitrary with respect to those material constraints … they can loosen the organization of the current behavior but cannot force the formation of the behavior that is to come.”
  • Direction from attunement (§5.2.3). “Bodily activity spontaneously tends to self-organize in accordance with motivations”, through evolution, development and learning, with Ashby’s breaks and Watson et al.’s self-optimization as models.

The theory could have been otherwise: it could have given irruptions a direction (a biased perturbation, a channel to particular variables). It explicitly does not.

What this does not say

  • That motivations do make such a difference, or that indeterminism holds: both are axioms.
  • That entropy measures irruption. The paper proposes it and gives no way to separate motivated unpredictability from other unpredictability.
  • That attunement makes underdetermined behaviour the agent’s own. That is the paper’s further, unestablished claim (THEORY-1321).

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