Froese, Tom and Georgii, Karelin and Takashi, Ikegami (2023) Making mind matter with irruption theory: Bridging end-directedness and entropy production by satisfying the participation criterion. [Preprint]
Text
From LMEP to IT v1.7 - submitted.docx Download (82kB) |
Abstract
Biological processes are end-directed, that is, teleological. Explaining the physical efficacy of end-directedness continues to be a profound challenge for theoretical biology, especially given its unavoidable implications for our own self-understanding. For a comprehensive theory of life, it is pivotal to bridge our human-centric view of end-directedness, which the social sciences and humanities consider intrinsic to our actions, with the natural sciences’ view of actions’ in purely physiological terms, especially in terms of thermodynamic tendencies. A comprehensive theory should therefore provide an end-involving account, which illuminates how both physiology and teleology distinctly contribute to behavior generation. Here we introduce the “Participation Criterion”: End-involvement in a bodily process entails that, in principle, it is distinguishable from one without end-involvement, specifically in terms of physiologically unpredictable changes in unexplainable variability. To exemplify the difficulty of satisfying this criterion, we critically analyze two theories on the thermodynamic basis of end-directedness. We then propose that “Irruption Theory” points to a way forward because it predicts that bodily processes have an end-involvement-dependent increase in their entropy rate. This is consistent with evidence of an association between conscious intention and neural fluctuations, is open to further experimental verification, and provides a novel perspective on the role of thermodynamic entropy production in the organism.
Export/Citation: | EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL |
Social Networking: |
Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Creators: |
|
||||||||||||
Keywords: | maximum entropy production principle; dissipative structures; autogen; autocatakinetics; ecological psychology; agency | ||||||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Biology > Function/Teleology Specific Sciences > Complex Systems Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Consciousness General Issues > Determinism/Indeterminism General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Theory/Observation |
||||||||||||
Depositing User: | Dr. Tom Froese | ||||||||||||
Date Deposited: | 06 Dec 2023 02:53 | ||||||||||||
Last Modified: | 06 Dec 2023 02:53 | ||||||||||||
Item ID: | 22824 | ||||||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Biology > Function/Teleology Specific Sciences > Complex Systems Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Consciousness General Issues > Determinism/Indeterminism General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Theory/Observation |
||||||||||||
Date: | 2023 | ||||||||||||
URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22824 |
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
View Item |