Underdetermination and causality in Irruption Theory: A critical analysis from a complex systems perspective

Abstract

In an article from 2023, Tom Froese suggests Irruption Theory as a new conceptual framework for understanding the causal efficacy of normative states, particularly concerning motivations for action in embodied agents. Froese’s theory is built on three central tenets, two of which—the Irruption and Scalability theses—are central to its claim that normative states causally affect behavior via the creation and amplification of the microscopic, stochastic processes after which the theory is named. According to Froese, this amplification process explains why agential behavior is underdetermined by its material basis, creating a causal gap that can be filled by causally-efficacious normative states. In this commentary, I argue that the Irruption and Scalability theses do not give a sufficiently detailed account of how underdetermination arises in material systems and how the scaling-up of irruptions causally affects normative behavior. However, the theses should not be rejected outright. Rather, I argue that Irruption Theory should adopt central concepts from complex systems theory in order to adequately describe the causal efficacy of normativity in embodied agents. To this end, I suggest that it should identify normative states as relations holding between embodied agents and similar-scale systems in their environment. These relations can be usefully described and modeled as topologies of a large-scale agent-environment system that top-down constrain an agent’s behavior. Accordingly, I propose interpreting irruptions as a boundary condition for normative behavior, with normative states as one of its control parameters (237 words).