Froese Tom
Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son 904-0495, Okinawa, Japan.
Entropy (Basel). 2023 May 2;25(5):748. doi: 10.3390/e25050748.
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.
认知科学缺乏概念工具来描述主体的动机本身如何在其行为产生过程中发挥作用。生成认知进路通过发展一种宽松的自然主义，并将规范性置于生命和心智的核心取得了进展；所有认知活动都是一种有动机的活动。它摒弃了表征架构，尤其是将规范性的作用具体化为局部“价值”函数的做法，转而支持诉诸有机体系统层面属性的解释。然而，鉴于主体层面规范性的效力完全等同于非规范性系统层面活动的效力，同时假定操作等效性，这些解释将具体化问题推到了更高的描述层面。为了使规范性具有自身的效力，提出了一种新型的非还原论理论：突现理论。引入突现概念是为了间接操作化主体在其活动中的有动机参与，具体而言是根据其物质基础对其状态的相应不确定性来进行操作化。这意味着突现与（神经）生理活动的不可预测性增加相关联，因此，它们应该可以根据信息论熵进行量化。相应地，行动、认知和意识与更高水平的神经熵相关联的证据可以被解释为表明有更高水平的有动机的主体参与。与直觉相反，突现并不与适应性行为形成对比。相反，正如复杂适应性系统的人工生命模型所表明的，神经活动中任意变化的突发可以促进适应性的自组织。因此，突现理论使得理解主体的动机本身如何对其行为产生有效差异成为可能，而无需主体能够直接控制其身体的神经生理过程。
