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.

The Fundamental Tension in Integrated Information Theory 4.0’s Realist Idealism

“…Arguably, this may result in a better version of IIT, one which would be more aligned to an ontological form of emergentism [6,47]. This emergentist IIT could provide, given the theory's robust causal formalism [21,[48][49][50][51], a crucial aid to advance our scientific understanding of the causal difference that consciousness seems to make in a diversity of phenomena such as motivation [52][53][54][55][56], psychedelic medicine [57][58][59][60], information integration and behavioural flexibility [61], free will [62-65], and other psychological and behavioural functions [66][67][68][69], thus holding the potential to significantly advance our scientific knowledge of consciousness and its place in nature.…”