On motivating irruptions: the need for a multilevel approach at the interface between life and mind

Abstract

In a recent remarkable article, Froese (2023) presents his Irruption Theory to explain how motivations can make a behavioral difference in motivated activity. In this opinion article, we review the main tenets of Froese’s theory, and highlight its difficulty in overcoming the randomness challenge it supposedly solves, that is, the issue of how adaptive behavior can arise in the face of material underdetermination. To advance our understanding of motivated behavior in line with Froese’s approach, we recommend that future work should endorse a multilevel pluralistic approach to causation and explanation in which motivations could genuinely play an irreducible role. Additionally, in line with the life-mind continuity thesis, we suggest that the best place to look for the interplay between motivations and nonmotivational physical, biological, and dynamical factors, may be at the level of the continuous feeling of being an embodied, living organism.

1. Irruption theory and the efficacy of motivations

Froese’s Irruption Theory (2023) aims to elucidate how motivations, particularly those imbued with value, can make a behavioral difference in motivated activity. The latter is defined as “a particular kind of end-directed activity that is driven by the intrinsic preferences of the system in question” (Barrett, 2020b, p. 90). Froese’ approach is centered in offering a novel, enactive conceptualization of motivated activity, such that the role of motivations is considered, and they are not left to the status of mere epiphenomena. Froese (2023) refers to this approach as a “motivation-involving” (p. 17) account of motivated activity, which is proposed as advancing an enactive account in line with the libertarian philosophy of freedom and agency. According to it, the motivated activity of an agent is not completely determined by her material embodiment but also irreducibly caused by her motivations. Importantly, although Froese doesn’t explicitly identify himself as either a substance or property dualist, he endorses a “relaxed naturalism” (Hutto & Satne, 2018) where motivations are inescapably mental and irreducible to their material counterparts: “an agent’s motivations are taken to constitute a distinctive and intrinsic part of nature in addition to its materiality” (Froese, 2023, pp. 15–6). With these commitments in place, Froese’s Irruption Theory is intended to overcome current limitations of enactive proposals that also regard aspects of the subjective activity of an agent as irreducibly efficacious (Di Paolo et al., 2010; Fuchs, 2018; 2021; Thompson, 2007; Thompson & Varela, 2001; Varela & Thompson, 2003; see also Meling & Scheidegger, 2023), but which doesn’t provide a satisfactory account of how this could be the case.

Froese’s main target of criticism is the common enactive strategy of attempting to explain the effect of conscious activity on neural dynamics as a form of downward causation or global-to-local constraint (Thompson & Varela, 2001; Thompson, 2007). In our opinion, he correctly points out that picturing this causal relationship in terms of global properties of brain activity (e.g., global order parameters, collective variables, and so on) having a determinative influence on the dynamics of the local components of the neural substrate is unsatisfactory. We fully agree that “there is simply no conceptual room for a motivation-involving account if all efficacy is offloaded to a nonmotivational organizing property of the material body” (Froese, 2023, p. 8). Although this common enactive view endorses a multilevel view of causal interactions that surely enriches the standard reductionistic picture, as long as the causally determinative global property remains deprived of any intelligible mental attribute, it seems to be an instance of a nonmental global property of a physical substrate having an effect on its local properties. A complementary critique is offered by Cea (2023), who states that the causal relationship between experience and the local activity of its neural substrate arguably does not correspond to a form of global-to-local or downward determinative influence, because these interlevel forms of causation presuppose a whole-parts relation that does not seem to obtain between conscious activity and local neural processes.

The main components of Froese’s theory are its three axioms, working hypothesis, and three main theses. The three axioms are: 1) motivational efficacy: motivations are irreducibly efficacious; 2) incomplete materiality: the impossibility of measuring how motivations make a causal difference; and 3) underdetermined materiality: the physical underdetermination of motivated behavior. The theory’s main working hypothesis, in turn, states that “The more an agent’s embodied activity is motivated, the less that activity is determined by its material basis” (p. 10, italics in the original). Importantly, this entails that irruptions are associated with increased levels of unpredictability as measured for example, by the informational property of entropy. Finally, the three theses are: 1) irruption thesis: the living body is an incomplete system in the sense that the more motivations are involved in behavior, the more materially underdetermined the latter will be; 2) scalability thesis: microscopic material underdetermination is amplified in the living body to a macroscopic level in which behavior can be affected; and 3) attunement thesis: the living body responds to amplified irruptions (i.e., material underdetermination due to the involvement of motivations) in a “context-sensitive and adaptive manner” (p. 11), such that the resulting behavior is neither random nor rigid, but appropriate to the circumstances and preferences of the organism.

Very importantly, the third thesis of attunement carries the heavier burden of explaining how this approach to motivated behavior overcomes the well-known “luck objection” to libertarian accounts of free will (McKenna & Pereboom, 2016). In our context of discussion, it is the problem of explaining how the material underdetermination of an agent’s actions does not entail that her purported autonomously motivated behavior ends-up being really a random o lucky outcome of indeterministic processes. In other words, it is the double challenge of explaining how motivated behavior could be both materially underdetermined and non-random. Crucially, Froese (2023) asserts that his irruption theory “solves this double challenge” (p. 9). In the next section, we argue that irruption theory falls short of overcoming this problem.

2. The problem of the attunement of scaled-up irruptions

As mentioned, the main task of explaining how motivated behavior is non-random even if it is materially underdetermined is placed in the third thesis of attunement. Although Froese (2023) mentions various promising models that could ground and further develop the attunement thesis, such as the embodied approach to habits (Ramírez-Vizcaya & Froese, 2020), implicit body memory (Froese & Izquierdo, 2018), and meta-stable attunement (Bruineberg et al., 2021), he favors the self-optimization model of adaptivity and regulation (Froese et al., 2023). The latter proposes that a system, such as a neural network, can spontaneously optimize its internal organization to better satisfy its constraints over time (i.e., solve a “constraint satisfaction” problem). This is achieved through a process of learning and adaptation, involving reversible dynamics, irreversible dynamics, and historicity. Reversible dynamics allow the system to converge into and maintain a state of equilibrium, while irreversible dynamics involve the system transiently entering a far-from-equilibrium state, increasing the chances of converging into a new, different state of equilibrium. Historicity involves the accumulation of correlations of previous states, increasing the chances of those correlations reoccurring. The model also incorporates the concept of “resets”, where a certain number of states in the system are changed or “reset” to a new state, simulating the system opening up to its environment.

Through this process, the system can find “deeper” equilibria, or states that satisfy more constraints, enhancing its adaptivity and regulatory capabilities. Froese attributes such importance to this model for the underpinnings of the attunement thesis, that he states that

Irruption theory in combination with the self-optimization model, therefore, holds potential to provide a novel systems theoretic answer to the main concern raised against libertarian interpretations of motivated activity, i.e., regarding how an agent’s behavior can be effective even when it is underdetermined. (Froese, 2023, p. 15)

Unfortunately, we think that the self-optimization model as a way to unpack the attunement of motivated behavior as scaled-up irruptions suffers from the same problem that Froese attributes to the common enactive strategy of invoking global order parameters to explain the efficacy of mental processes on neural dynamics and behavior. Trying to understand the efficacy of motivations either as global-to-local determinative influences or as self-optimization are both ways of conceiving the effect of motivations in nonmotivational terms. More specifically, in the case of self-optimization, the properties that drive the behavior of the system towards deeper states of equilibria are the system’s ability to iterate between equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium dynamics, combined with a form of historicity. However, these capacities follow from the structural, dynamical, and functional properties of the system, none of which allude to anything near “motivations as such” to work as they do. In other words, although these systems are remarkable in their capacities to self-organize towards global coordinated constraint satisfaction, and hence, towards forms of adaptive, context-dependent behavior, they do it entirely in virtue of nonmotivational properties, that is, their behavior has a full causal explanation in terms of nonmotivational factors. Therefore, without substantive further development, in which an intelligible causal and/or constitutive link between motivations as such and the nonmotivational properties that drive self-optimization is established, it is far from clear how the latter combined with irruption theory can solve the problem of randomness or luck.

A similar problem arises for a view in the theoretical vicinity of Froese’s: Barrett’s thermogenic approach to motivated behavior (Barrett, 2020a; 2020b). Barrett explores the possibility that motivated behavior may be a particular form of a more general physical phenomenon. He considers the thermodynamically driven end-directed activity common to all living systems and physical dissipative structures, in which “extremal properties” such as the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production (PMEP) (Swenson, 2020; Swenson & Turvey, 1991) purportedly offer “thermodynamic reasons” for the emergence of order at macroscopic levels. Barrett proposes that extremal properties such as PMEP “might be co-opted and directed by organisms as the driving force of motivated behavior” (Barrett, 2020a, p. 3). In other words, the motivated behavior of living organisms may be a particular case of a very general physical principle that guides the achievement of macroscopic order in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamical systems.

However, if we are seeking a motivation-involving account of motivated behavior in which motivations as such act as causal influences in end-directed behaviors, we still need an intelligible link between “thermodynamic reasons” and “motivating reasons” such that we could understand how motivations influence behavior based on principles such as PMEP. Moreover, such an account would need to respect the distinction between an inherently psychological and experiential, end-directed motivation like a desire; and a mindless thermodynamic extremizing tendency such as PMEP. Additionally, it would need to show how the influence of the psychological motivation is not causally excluded by the physical extremizing property; nothing less than the causal exclusion problem (Kim, 1998; 2005) applied to motivations under a thermogenic approach.

3. Conclusions and recommendations for future work

We conclude that Froese’ Irruption Theory, as well as Barrett’s related thermogenic approach, are very promising but still incomplete frameworks to think about the interplay between mental and nonmental (e.g., physical and dynamical) properties in motivated activity. More specifically, they seem to excessively downplay the explanatory and causal role of the phenomenological and psychological aspects of motivated activity, privileging, instead, its nonmental underpinnings. We suggest that future motivation-involving accounts of motivated activity, especially from an enactive perspective, should avoid explaining the role of motivations in entirely nonmotivational terms. Instead, we recommend endorsing a multilevel, pluralistic approach to causation and explanation, such as those being recently discussed in theoretical assessments of psychiatry and psychedelic medicine (Aday et al., 2023; Carhart-Harris, 2018; Gauld et al., 2022; Girn et al., 2023; van Elk & Yaden, 2022; Yaden & Griffiths, 2020). Concerning the explanatory and causal role of the phenomenological dimension in psychedelic medicine, for instance, it has been recently declared that “the case for subjective effects playing a major role in enduring beneficial effects is compelling… underlying neurobiological-based mechanisms are undoubtedly necessary but likely not sufficient to confer full beneficial effects” (Yaden and Griffiths 2020, p. 570). The researchers argue that the subjective, lived character of, for example, a mystical-type experience, most probably plays an irreducible role in determining the long-term effects of psychedelic interventions, in addition to mechanisms at the neurobiological level. More generally, the multifaceted nature of mental disorders and the interventions needed to address them are calling for a pluralistic approach in which “cognitive and phenomenological processes… may be more explanatorily powerful… [we need] research frameworks that productively integrate constructs and examine pharmacological interactions at multiple levels of explanation” (Aftab and Stein, 2022, p. 2). We think that the same is urgently needed for our understanding of motivated behavior. We need to develop a multilevel pluralistic theory in which motivations as such figure in our accounts, without being replaced by nonmotivational factors. In other words, the challenge is to understand how phenomena at multiple levels of description interact, integrate, and fit with each other non-reductively, that is, without necessarily trying to explain, for example, psychological phenomena in terms of non-psychological processes.

Given the centrality of the life-mind continuity thesis for the enactive approach (Thompson, 2007) and other influential views (Kirchhoff & Froese, 2017; Seth, 2021; Seth & Tsakiris, 2018; Wiese & Friston, 2021), we further recommend placing special attention to the inherently motivational dimension of the ubiquitous feeling of being alive, recently conceptualized as the continuous organismic sentience (“COS”) that pervades all experience (Cea & Martínez-Pernía, 2023). This COS would be a pre-reflective, ongoing, background bodily feeling exerting a very basic but allo/homeostatically significant influence on the organism’s behavior. Importantly, it would provide the most basic and ubiquitous motivational direction regarding the agent’s behavior along a two-dimensional space: i) action versus inaction; ii) perpetuate current state versus change current state. So, for instance, a pleasant, low-aroused feeling of relaxation would motivate the subject to remain inactive to perpetuate her current homeostatically beneficial state; while an unpleasant, but highly aroused feeling of anxiety would dispose the subject to act to change her current noxious state. Importantly, this basic, but ubiquitous motivational directionality might be the most intimate link between life and mind, at least in human consciousness, and hence, the best place to start exploring the interconnections and reciprocal, multilevel influences between nonmotivational physical, biological, and dynamical properties, and motivations as such.