1 Irruption Theory: A Realist Framework for the Efficacy of Conscious Agency

2
3 Tom Froese
4
5 tom.froese@oist.jp
6
7 Embodied Cognitive Science Unit
8 Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
9 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
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11
12 Abstract
13
14 All human affairs assume a priori that people are conscious agents—that our subjectively
15 lived perspective genuinely makes a difference to behavior. Yet natural science has been in
16 apparent tension with this genuine subjectivity, because in principle nothing but material
17 processes are measurable in our bodies. Standard theories of consciousness further obscure
18 its genuine role—and ultimately undermine their own coherence—by directly identifying it
19 with material processes. However, the tension is avoidable because a complete account of
20 material processes is also fundamentally impossible. I propose an alternative framework
21 centered on the consequent prospect that the role of consciousness is related to this
22 material underdetermination of our living embodiment. Specifically, I introduce the concept
23 of irruption to operationalize the uncertainty in measurement resulting from a person’s
24 exercise of conscious agency: increased subjective involvement in embodied action is
25 indirectly observable as increased underdetermination of the body’s physiological
26 processes, akin to decreased physical constraints. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not entail
27 random behavior; rather, they can facilitate behavioral switching and the self-organization
28 of an implicit capacity for generalization, as indicated by models of complex adaptive
29 systems. An approximate information-theoretic measure of irruptions is entropy, including
30 in brain activity, which makes it intelligible why increased neural entropy is associated with
31 consciousness, cognition, and agency. The upshot is that we are conscious agents who can
32 make an effective difference to our embodied actions, yet without being able (nor needing)
33 to directly control our body’s material processes.
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35
36 1. Introduction
37
38 Our subjective experiences – of self, of others, and of the world – are some of the most
39 significant aspects of our existence. It is therefore not surprising that many of the things
40 that we do, we do precisely so that we can live through the experience of doing them, like
41 eating our favorite foods, meeting to chat with friends, traveling to see other places, or
42 listening to our favorite music. Simply put, consciousness matters (Cleeremans & Tallon-
43 Baudry, 2022).
44
45 The central importance of the efficacy of our conscious agency is typically taken for granted
46 in human affairs and forms the basis of our social contract. And yet while this supposition is
47 rather unsurprising from a common-sense perspective, just how the subjective dimension of

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48 our agency as such could make a difference to physical behavior remains a challenge from a
49 scientific perspective (Potter & Mitchell, 2022). Despite some progress in the science of
50 consciousness, there is still little consensus about what consciousness is, what it is for, or
51 how it is related to its material embodiment (Seth & Bayne, 2022). Even if we leave the
52 “hard” metaphysical questions about consciousness to philosophers (Chalmers, 1996),
53 experimentalists similarly face seemingly insurmountable challenges when investigating
54 more practical questions. For instance, explaining how a person as such can be responsible
55 for even the most mundane decision, such as acting on their urge to move a finger, is a
56 fundamentally open scientific problem (Schurger, Hu, Pak, & Roskies, 2021). It is this
57 precisely this conundrum of the efficacy of our conscious agency that will be the focal point
58 for developing an alternative theory of how consciousness and matter relate to each other.
59
60 Where could this alternative come from? It may seem that the best that we can do is aim
61 for ever more detailed description of the material processes associated with our conscious
62 agency, from the level of the agent-environment behavioral dynamics to the level of
63 elementary neurophysiology, and perhaps even down to the level of quantum biology. This
64 is important scientific work, especially as there continue to be many unknowns. And yet at
65 the same time it is questionable whether these incremental, business-as-usual strategies
66 that are often advocated (e.g., Damasio, 2021) are sufficient for the fundamental task at
67 hand. Arguably, standard theories of consciousness simply do not provide the conceptual
68 space required to genuinely accommodate the efficacy of our conscious agency as such. It is
69 typically argued that for consciousness to make a difference in the material world, it must
70 somehow supervene on, be represented by, or even be identical with, with material
71 processes and their organization. Even explicitly nonreductive approaches, which emphasize
72 the importance of taking the first-person perspective into account in explanations of the
73 mind and behavior, find it difficult to go beyond identity theory (Myin & Zahnoun, 2018;
74 Varela, 1996). But this kind of argument implies that it is ultimately only that material basis,
75 and not consciousness per se, that makes a difference in the world.
76
77 The consequences of this conceptual sleight-of-hand are grave when confronted with the
78 undeniable assumption that the subjective dimension of consciousness really matters – how
79 genuine subjectivity is in fact foundational to all human affairs. Fortunately, the need to live
80 our lives as conscious agents for whom experience itself matters is stronger than the need
81 to live in accordance with scientific theory that undermines our genuine subjectivity. But
82 scientifically the problem is pervasive, as the case of consciousness is a particularly acute
83 demonstration of a more general failure. Cognitive science has been unable to provide an
84 account of the phenomena of life and mind in a way that respects their specificity, e.g., that
85 life and mind are characterized by conditions of success and failure in contrast to purely
86 material phenomena, while at the same time allowing that this subjective dimension itself
87 can make a difference to the material process of behavior (Froese & Taguchi, 2019).
88
89 As an illustrative example, consider that the neural activity of “place cells” in the brain of a
90 rodent is correlated with its location in the environment. This correlation between internal
91 and external states is typically taken as a justification to attribute to that neural activity the
92 status of a representation of the rodent’s mental content of that location (e.g., Moser,
93 Kropff, & Moser, 2008). Yet, at the same time, experimental investigation of those neurons
94 does not reveal anything else being involved in their activity other than the usual

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 95 biochemistry and electrical potentials. The attributed mental content never shows up in the
96 material processes of such a neuron at all, nor is there any compelling theory in sight of how
97 such mental content and its specific conditions could ever play a role in neural activity in the
98 first place (Hutto & Myin, 2017). In other words, the first step in making fundamental
99 progress toward a science of genuine subjectivity involves the sobering realization that, so
100 far, cognitive science has been building castles in the air.
101
102 Yet prominent voices have argued that we should stop worrying about how to address this
103 failure and simply learn to embrace that, ultimately, consciousness and our sense of agency
104 are simply misleading (Dennett, 2015). To be fair, at least this kind of skepticism is
105 superficially consistent with the evidence: while subjective experience seems qualitatively
106 distinct from its material basis, nothing but material processes show up in scientific
107 measurements. But at the same time, we may question whether this skeptical position does
108 justice to the level of uncertainty of the scientific facts. Any interpretation of the absence of
109 measurable evidence of subjective involvement in bodily activity should be tempered by the
110 realization that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Moreover, as indicated
111 above and argued for more extensively elsewhere (Froese & Taguchi, 2019), the conceptual
112 framing of cognitive science is simply forcing a skeptical conclusion no matter the evidence:
113 the assumptions of standard theories, whether representational or dynamical, rule out in
114 principle that conscious agency, in its own right, could make a difference to behavior.
115
116 In summary, despite some high-profile optimism in the science of consciousness that no
117 fundamental change to the status quo is required for making significant progress, the
118 conundrum of the efficacy of our conscious agency remains a formidable open challenge. In
119 response to this challenge, this article introduces Irruption Theory as an alternative, non-
120 reductive framework that has the conceptual resources to develop a scientific account of
121 genuine subjectivity – of how consciousness matters, specifically of how our conscious
122 agency makes a difference to behavior in its own right. It pursues this ambition with a
123 twofold strategy that fully embraces the core insights derived from both a third-person and
124 a first-person perspective on embodied action:
125
126 1) Irruption Theory takes scientific measurements at face value: nothing but material
127 processes can be measured in a person’s embodied action.
128
129 2) Irruption Theory takes phenomenological reflection at face value: our conscious
130 agency makes a difference to our embodied action.
131
132 The first scientific strategy highlights Irruption Theory’s inspiration from dynamical, non-
133 representational approaches to cognitive science (Beer, 2000; Chemero, 2009; Kelso, 1995;
134 Thelen & Smith, 1994; van Gelder & Port, 1995). The second phenomenological strategy
135 underscores Irruption Theory’s agreement with enactive approaches that take seriously the
136 phenomenology of our lived experience and its biological embodiment (Gallagher, 2005;
137 Noë, 2009; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). However, as discussed
138 above, Irruption Theory disagrees with proposals by some of these approaches to replace
139 the representationalism of standard cognitive science by directly identifying our conscious
140 agency with material-organizational patterns or top-down constraints operating on the
141 brain-body-environment system (e.g., Deacon, 2012; Juarrero, 1999; Myin & Zahnoun, 2018;

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142 O'Regan & Noë, 2001; Varela & Thompson, 2003). In this regard, Irruption Theory sides with
143 phenomenological approaches to cognitive science that caution that the human being can
144 neither be reduced to, nor completely identified with, its third-person scientific description
145 (T. Fuchs, 2018; Zahavi, 2017). Similarly, it sides with analytic approaches that argue that it
146 is conceptually misguided to directly identify the subjective dimension of conscious agency
147 with the material processes of a living body (Hanna & Maiese, 2009).
148
149 Yet if mind and body are not just one, they are also not simply two (Varela, 1976). Irruption
150 Theory rejects substance dualism just as it rejects physicalism. Instead it accepts a liberal or
151 relaxed naturalism (Hutto & Satne, 2018), in which our existence as conscious agents is a
152 part of reality on par with that of the material universe, a stance which can be elaborated
153 into a form of participatory realism (Froese, 2022). Irruption Theory is also open to the
154 possibility that the concept of material nature may need to change to fully accommodate
155 human nature (Gallagher, 2018; Zahavi, 2017), although so far the jury is still out whether a
156 new kind of physics is needed to properly account for the phenomena of life and mind
157 (Davies, 2019; Kauffman, 2019). What is already evident is that progress in cognitive science
158 has been hampered by an overly conservative concept of nature – namely that of a closed,
159 fully deterministic clockwork universe. A crucial task for future work is therefore to start a
160 dialogue with contemporary approaches in physics, especially those that take seriously the
161 problem of the observer in the material world (Alexander, 2021; Barad, 2007; C. A. Fuchs,
162 2017; Smolin, 2019). Although the following exposition of Irruption Theory does not appeal
163 to any exotic or unknown physics, it does depend on the rejection of the concept of a
164 clockwork universe. Letting go of this outdated concept is necessary to clear the stage for a
165 deeper encounter between the sciences of mind and the sciences of nature.
166
167 2. Irruption Theory
168
169 2.1 Axioms
170
171 The starting point of Irruption Theory are two fundamental axioms. The first axiom of
172 genuine subjectivity is motivated by our everyday common sense of conscious agency. The
173 basic assumption is that our lived experience of engaging in embodied action, i.e., of a
174 subjective involvement in bodily activity, is not fictitious nor is it epiphenomenal; our
175 mental life thereby makes a difference in its own right to behavior. Behavior broadly refers
176 to anything done by the organism as a whole, which is not limited to overt movement
177 (Myin, 2016), while bodily activity refers in a general way to all the material processes that
178 are associated with, and occurring inside, a person’s body, including of course in their brain.
179 See, for example, the work of Fuchs (2018) for a detailed exposition of phenomenologically-
180 informed investigations that are motivating this first axiom. In a nutshell, this axiom means
181 that consciousness matters (Cleeremans & Tallon-Baudry, 2022; Froese, 2018).
182
183 The second axiom of incomplete materiality is derived from the empirical evidence of the
184 science of consciousness, and of cognitive science more broadly, which shows up nothing
185 but material processes dynamically at work in bodily activity. This axiom is further
186 supported by careful conceptual analysis (Hanna & Maiese, 2009). A detailed systems
187 theoretic exposition of this axiom can be found in the work of Deacon (2012). His analysis

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188 accepts the existence of subjective phenomena yet finds them to be absent from nature,
189 which is hence deemed to be incomplete in this respect.
190
191 Accordingly, the first two axioms of Irruption Theory are:
192
193 Axiom 1: Genuine subjectivity. We have the lived experience of our subjective
194 involvement as such making a difference to our bodily activity.
195
196 Axiom 2: Incomplete materiality. There is no measurable evidence of our subjective
197 involvement as such making a difference to our bodily activity.
198
199 Each of these axioms seems to be independently valid. Yet taken together they are in
200 tension because Axiom 2 does not offer direct empirical support for Axiom 1. Accordingly,
201 many researchers attempt to fit consciousness into the natural order by explicitly or
202 implicitly undermining the validity of these axioms. Strategies include undermining Axiom 1
203 by turning the lived experience into an illusion or fiction; weakening Axiom 1 by making
204 consciousness identical with its material basis; or weakening both Axioms 1 and 2 by
205 postulating the presence of representational vehicles in the brain whose content mediates
206 the efficacy of consciousness. These strategies are beset by theoretical problems that have
207 not yet yielded a satisfactory solution (Hutto, 1999; Hutto & Myin, 2013). Importantly, given
208 that the two axioms are independently compelling, it would be preferable to find a way to
209 dissolve their tension without undermining either of them.
210
211 Irruption Theory takes both axioms as valid, but it demarcates the scope of both axioms
212 such that the tension is diffused. Specifically, Axiom 1 would be problematic for Axiom 2
213 only if we could experience precisely how our subjective involvement makes a difference to
214 bodily activity; yet this is not the case (Chang, Biehl, Yu, & Kanai, 2020). When we lift our
215 finger, it simply rises – we do not know how so, no matter how much we bring preconscious
216 processes into awareness. More importantly, Axiom 2 is problematic for Axiom 1 only if we
217 make an additional philosophical assumption, namely of the complete causal closure of
218 material processes; yet this assumption cannot be directly observed. Arguably, the notion of
219 a completely deterministic universe has already been shown to be invalid according to our
220 most accurate natural science, quantum physics (Conway & Kochen, 2009). And if the
221 universe is irreducibly nondeterministic at its very core, hence so are the material processes
222 that constitute our bodily activity. However, this is just one popular approach that argues
223 against the assumption of complete determinism; there are others that will be discussed in
224 more detail later. For now, what is most important is to highlight the consequent rejection
225 of the assumption of a clockwork universe. Irruption Theory does this by proposing a third
226 axiom, underdetermined materiality:
227
228 Axiom 3: Underdetermined materiality. Our bodily activity is underdetermined by its
229 material processes.
230
231 The extent of this underdetermination of bodily activity remains to be established, but it is
232 noteworthy that the brain and behavioral sciences, just like quantum physics, have always
233 been essentially statistical sciences, even despite extensive efforts to uncover deterministic
234 laws akin to those of classical physics. What Axiom 3 implies is that, similar to the quantum

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235 revolution in physics, we should accept this unpredictability as inherent in the phenomena
236 of life and mind, rather than explain it away as deriving from ambiguous experimental
237 design or error of measurement. In addition, with Axiom 3 in place, the root cause of the
238 apparent tension between Axioms 1 and 2 has lost its force: Axiom 2’s statement of the
239 absence of directly measurable evidence of subjective involvement in material processes
240 retains its status of being a matter of fact; however, given Axiom 3, Axiom 2 can no longer
241 be re-interpreted as evidence of absence counting against Axiom 1, given that by necessity
242 Axiom 2 could never provide a full account of bodily activity in the first place.
243
244 If we were to stop at this conclusion, then at least we would have gained a truce of logical
245 compatibility between consciousness science and human experience. Irruption Theory goes
246 one step further by incorporating the role of underdetermination into a scientific research
247 program: by shifting consciousness science from its traditional focus on Axiom 2 to a more
248 systematic engagement with Axiom 3, we may discover hidden degrees of freedom in the
249 material processes of our body, which are associated with our subjective involvement as per
250 Axiom 1, but without thereby calling into question the evidence for Axiom 2. The research
251 program proposed by Irruption Theory consists of four core theses.
252
253 2.2 Theses
254
255 The innovative contribution of Irruption Theory is the hypothesis that we can indirectly
256 measure changes in subjective involvement in terms of changes in the underdetermination
257 of the subject’s physiological processes. Note that not all increases in underdetermination
258 are necessarily markers of subjective involvement; in accordance with Axiom 3 there will in
259 general be irreducible background levels of nondeterministic fluctuations in all physiological
260 processes, indeed in all processes. The concept of irruption refers only to those increases in
261 the underdetermination of bodily activity that are specifically associated with increases in
262 subjective involvement. Note also that an increase in underdetermination of the material
263 processes corresponding to an increase in subjective involvement is taken to be an intrinsic
264 property of those material processes; it is not only an increase in the observer-relative
265 uncertainty of the measurements of those processes.
266
267 This general sketch of Irruption Theory raises four important questions that need to be
268 addressed by its scientific research program:
269
270 1) What is it about our material bodies that makes them susceptible to irruptions?
271
272 2) In what form does an irruption manifest itself in our material bodies?
273
274 3) How could an irruption make a difference at the scale of our whole body?
275
276 4) How could a scaled-up irruption result in appropriate behavior?
277
278 In response to these four questions Irruption Theory proposes four theses, namely
279 embodiment, irruption, scalability, and attunement.
280

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281 Embodiment Thesis. Our body is organized as a living system such that its existence
282 is associated with a lived perspective – the source of subjective involvement.
283
284 Irruption Thesis. Our body is organized as an incomplete system such that it is open
285 to subjective involvement via increased material underdetermination – irruptions.
286
287 Scalability Thesis. Our body is organized as a poised system such that it amplifies
288 microscopic irruptions to a macroscopic level relevant for behavior.
289
290 Attunement Thesis. Our body is organized as an attuned system such that it
291 spontaneously recovers from scaled-up irruptions in an adaptive manner.
292
293 Each of these four theses draws on existing research programs and incorporates them into
294 the alternative framework by Irruption Theory.
295
296 2.2.1 Embodiment Thesis
297
298 Living beings are materially self-producing. They belong to a special class of far-from-
299 equilibrium thermodynamic systems, also known as dissipative structures (Prigogine, 1997),
300 which use energy gradients to create material-organizational constraints, such that they
301 adaptively maintain their existence by remaining distinct from their environment. This
302 general idea of adaptive self-production has been formulated in many ways, including in no
303 specific order the work-constraint cycle (Kauffman, 2000), recursive self-maintenance
304 (Bickhard, 2009), autogenesis (Deacon, 2012), autocatakinetic closure (Swenson, 2000),
305 autopoiesis (Varela, 1997), and the chemoton (Ganti, 1975). This material-organizational
306 basis of the phenomenon of life has been extensively covered elsewhere (Longo & Montévil,
307 2014; Luisi, 2006; Moreno & Mossio, 2015). What is important in the context of Irruption
308 Theory is that these proposals broadly agree that, in contrast to abiotic self-organization, a
309 living body is characterized by two intertwined self-referential conditions:
310
311 1) Self-production: The existence of the material processes that constitute a living body
312 depends on organic compounds, whose production in turn depends on the work of
313 chemical synthesis realized by those very same processes.
314
315 2) Self-maintenance: The existence of the material processes that constitute a living
316 body depends on boundary conditions, whose maintenance in turn depends on the
317 regulatory work realized by those very same processes.
318
319 A living system’s self-referential network of material processes thus entails that its very
320 existence is its own achievement and is so under precarious conditions, that is, under the
321 condition of irreducible mortality. At any moment life can fail to maintain the production of
322 its own existence, and this possibility of failure is arguably the origin of intrinsic biological
323 normativity. The appearance of normativity may go some way to clarifying why explaining
324 the origin of life is not scientific business as usual, but remains a major open experimental
325 and theoretical challenge (Froese, 2021). Although this is not a knock-down argument, the
326 fact that an individual’s mis-regulation of internal and interactional activity can lead to the

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327 cessation of their very existence is suggestive of why the world matters to them in the first
328 place (Froese, 2017; Jonas, 1992).
329
330 The enactive approach to cognitive science has long been developing this theoretical link
331 between living precariousness and lived meaning (Di Paolo, 2018; Weber & Varela, 2002),
332 including its implications for the science of consciousness (Thompson, 2007, 2015). While it
333 is still a minority position in the science of consciousness, the enactive approach offers itself
334 to be developed into a fitting partner for Irruption Theory. A tantalizing prospect for
335 formalizing the possibility of irruptions is that the logic of self-reference in mathematics, as
336 developed by Gödel and others, bears an intriguing similarity to the circular organization of
337 the living body as a system of self-production of material processes (Varela, 1984). This self-
338 reference of the living body has been interpreted as an incompleteness of its own
339 organization, which entails that its processes must unfold in an open-ended manner across
340 time. In addition, Gödel’s work on self-reference has also been associated with our sense of
341 self, although so far in a way that undermines its own efficacy (Hofstadter, 2007).
342
343 In the context of Irruption Theory, a stronger interpretation can be made: the self-reference
344 inherent in the operations of living systems implies that there are objective uncertainties
345 about their material states. For example, it may in principle be impossible to distinguish if a
346 bodily state was an effect caused by the body’s material processes or by something else, or
347 to know in advance whether a process will terminate at some point or not. Moreover, in
348 contrast to a mathematical system whose formal organization is determined by us from the
349 outside, a living system’s organization itself is self-produced, so a case could be developed
350 that not just a system’s state, but its organization as a whole, is underdetermined. If so, the
351 Scalability Thesis proposed below may turn out to be unnecessary.
352
353 In sum, our living bodies are part of a unique class of material objects, namely “mixed
354 objects” that enmesh consciousness and matter (Varela & Depraz, 2003), yet without
355 eradicating their respective specificities – not one, not two. The enactive approach already
356 regarded the self-referential properties of organisms to be necessary conditions such that a
357 meaningful world shows up to their intrinsic perspective, that is, for consciousness (Noë,
358 2009). Irruption Theory complements this approach by making it imaginable that these are
359 the same kind of formal properties that constitute the material incompleteness through
360 which subjective involvement can make a difference in the body, namely via irruptions.
361
362 However, this is just an initial proposal regarding the formal conditions of irruptions and
363 future work needs to further develop this possibility. The current formulation of Irruption
364 Theory primarily emphasizes the conceptual innovation of irruptions, and it can remain
365 somewhat agnostic about what will turn out to be their precise conditions and material
366 expression. There are several theories of consciousness that have attracted substantially
367 more interest in neuroscience than the enactive approach (Seth & Bayne, 2022); these
368 theories may prefer to hold on to their own assumptions about the basis of consciousness,
369 while still benefiting from Irruption Theory’s conceptual clarity about the in-principle
370 possibility of subjective involvement in neural dynamics.
371
372 2.2.2 Irruption Thesis
373

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374 The primary ambition of Irruption Theory is to make conceptual space for consciousness to
375 genuinely make a difference to embodied action in its own right, that is, due to its
376 subjective dimension. This requirement entails that the cause of this difference in bodily
377 activity cannot be identifiable with or reducible to any aspect of the non-subjective
378 dimension of that action, that is, anything measurable by physics. In other words, to the
379 extent to which subjective involvement makes a difference to embodied action, this action
380 must correspondingly remain underdetermined by current and past material states of the
381 body, and of the universe more generally. This double insistence on the body being a mixed
382 object that enmeshes consciousness and matter, and on a strictly separate accounting of
383 the distinct contributions of subjective involvement and physical determination for an
384 action’s material processes, is essential. Irruption Theory thereby opens the conceptual
385 space to uphold a strong distinction between active and passive movement, e.g., between a
386 situation when your finger is lifting in correspondence with your intention to lift it (because
387 of irruptions), in contrast to when your finger is simply physically forced to lift without any
388 subjective involvement (because of a lack of irruptions).
389
390 There is a temptation to respond to this conceptual opening by jumping ahead to the
391 problem of precisely how – at which scale and by which mechanism – the subjective
392 dimension of consciousness could make a difference, in its own right, to the material
393 dimension of its embodiment. This is an important physical – but also metaphysical –
394 question to which Irruption Theory should strive to develop an intelligible response, perhaps
395 along the lines of dual aspect theory (T. Fuchs, 2018).
396
397 However, it is also essential to emphasize that its success as a scientific theory does not
398 depend on an answer to this question; in fact, it may even turn out to be part of the very
399 nature of reality that the precise bodily interface between consciousness and matter will in
400 principle remain unintelligible. Although this concession of a possible inscrutability will
401 sound unacceptable to the current intellectual climate in the science of consciousness, we
402 should remember potential antecedents in other areas of science. Most prominently, the
403 phenomenon of quantum decoherence and its relationship with scientific observation has
404 been resisting efforts to make it intelligible for a century. Yet this strange situation has not
405 prevented quantum physics from becoming the foundation of modern science; it was
406 sufficient to accept the limits of observation and to operationalize them. Similarly, even
407 though we may never directly measure the presence of the subjective in the material body,
408 we can still aspire to indirectly measure subjective involvement as the relative absence of
409 material determinations of bodily activity.
410
411 Indeed, interesting empirical work can be done once irruptions are operationalized, even if
412 it captures underdetermination only in an approximate manner. For this purpose, Irruption
413 Theory can draw on methodological advances in cognitive science that are developing
414 information-theoretic measures of entropy – a measure of the uncertainty of observing
415 certain states – for neural, physiological, and behavioral signals. Although a process’ change
416 in entropy does not directly measure its change in underdetermination, an increase in
417 underdetermination – that is, a decrease in constraints on future states – can generally be
418 expected to correspond to an increase in the states’ entropy. If this is on the right track, and
419 assuming that these kinds of measures set a lower bound on thermodynamic entropy (Lynn,
420 Cornblath, Papadopoulos, Bertolero, & Bassett, 2021), then Schrödinger’s (1944) classic

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421 proposal that organisms self-organize internally by offsetting the increase in internal order
422 by means of increasing the production of thermodynamic entropy in their environment may
423 need to be complemented by an internal dimension: irruptions could be associated with an
424 increase in the organism’s production of internal entropy. The relationship between order
425 and entropy in biology is a complex topic (Longo & Montévil, 2014), and it is not necessary
426 to enter further into it here. Future theoretical work could unpack the association between
427 increased entropy production and the appearance of the biosphere, and even the evolution
428 of brains (Jeffery & Rovelli, 2020), in terms of irruptions.
429
430 In the meantime, information-theoretic measures of entropy make an adequate starting
431 point for empirical work. And indeed, there is compelling evidence that levels of
432 consciousness awareness are associated with levels of neural entropy, a relationship which
433 has led to the notion of the “entropic brain” (Carhart-Harris, 2018; Carhart-Harris et al.,
434 2014). Specifically, levels of consciousness that are typically associated with reduced
435 awareness exhibit less neural entropy, such as dreamless sleep (Schartner, Pigorini, et al.,
436 2017), while levels of consciousness that are deemed to be above normal waking
437 consciousness exhibit increased neural entropy, especially the psychedelic state (Schartner,
438 Carhart-Harris, Barrett, Seth, & Muthukumaraswamy, 2017).
439
440 The specific contents of experience have also been associated with the uncertainty of neural
441 activity. For instance, increased variability of brain dynamics in a near-threshold auditory
442 classification has been employed as a neural signature of consciousness, independent of
443 subjective report (Sergent et al., 2021). From the perspective of the Irruption Thesis,
444 perception of audible yet unclear stimuli are expected to elicit more evidence of irruptions,
445 because such stimuli require more subjective involvement to complete the task. This
446 interpretation is also consistent with models of the increase in neural gain, which tends to
447 follow an uncertain stimulus, in terms of increased neural entropy (Shimazaki, 2018). The
448 same reasoning applies to the finding that an increase in the degrees of freedom of a
449 perceptual task, because of increased demand to track multiple features, corresponds to an
450 increase in neural entropy (Kosciessa, Lindenberger, & Garrett, 2021).
451
452 Switching from perception to action, Irruption Theory predicts intentional movement to be
453 associated with an underdetermination of the physiological processes. This complements
454 criticisms by Schurger et al. (2021) of the so-called “readiness potential” that statistically
455 precedes self-initiated movement, and which has often been interpreted as demonstrating a
456 lack of free will. They cast doubt on the causal relevance of this statistical pattern, and
457 instead observe that the moment of movement onset is associated with stochastic
458 fluctuations in neural activity. Relatedly, tasks involving movement result in some of the
459 highest levels of neural entropy (Lynn et al., 2021). Thus, Schurger et al. highlight a new
460 theoretical challenge for attributing the source of self-initiated movement to the
461 participant: the source of increased fluctuations in neural activity that trigger the movement
462 must be part of, or attributable to, the subject. The concept of irruption is a fitting answer
463 to this challenge because its thesis is that subjective involvement increases
464 underdetermination of neural activity.
465
466 2.2.3 Scalability Thesis
467

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468 It is not clear at which scale the onset of an irruption is situated. Due to the incompleteness
469 of the very organization of a living system, it could be a subtle yet pervasive system-level
470 change with top-down consequences on local states. If so, then one promising contender
471 for the formalization of irruptions is integrated information theory (Tononi, Boly, Massimini,
472 & Koch, 2016), especially its measure of the extent to which a system’s overall activity is
473 underdetermined by the activity of its parts (Mediano et al., 2021). This measure is typically
474 taken to be indicative of the existence of top-down constraints from the whole system to
475 the interactions between its parts, but it seems that the measure is actually agnostic about
476 exactly why the activity of the whole is underdetermined. Accordingly, this measure could
477 instead be developed into a marker of an irruption at the scale of the whole system.
478
479 Yet scientific investigations of the material processes of an organism have not yet been
480 confronted with a serious need to account for underdetermination at such macroscopic
481 scales, or at least not seriously enough to give up on the idea that a lack of predictability of
482 material processes at that scale has to do with anything other than the sheer complexity of
483 even the smallest living bodies. Accordingly, this suggests that the onset of an irruption is
484 most likely taking place at the smallest scales, where it can remain practically unobservable,
485 and then gets scaled up to macroscopic consequences by more deterministic processes.
486
487 There are several candidate mechanisms that could account for the scalability of irruptions.
488 As the philosopher Jonas (1981) had realized, we can even account for it within the domain
489 of classical physics. Consider the idealized situation of a macroscopic object arranged in an
490 unstable equilibrium point, like an upside-down cone perfectly balanced on its tip: any
491 microscopic perturbation would make it fall over, with the consequence that the direction
492 of that behavior would in practice be entirely unpredictable. Nevertheless, such a fine-tuned
493 situation is unlikely to be achieved in any material system.
494
495 A property that is more relevant for biology is chaos: it refers to the unpredictability of long-
496 term macroscopic trajectories of a system because it is sensitive to microscopic, in principle
497 infinitely small, differences in initial conditions (Langton, 1990). A related property of
498 biological systems is so-called pink noise or 1/f noise, which is a form of scale-free dynamics,
499 such that even the smallest perturbation can occasionally have macroscopic consequences
500 (Ward & Greenwood, 2007). The activity of the nervous system also exhibits 1/f noise,
501 which has physiological interpretations and dynamically changes with age, task demands
502 and cognitive states (Donoghue et al., 2020; He, 2014). An fitting account of the origins of
503 such dynamics in biological systems is self-organized criticality, whereby a system organizes
504 itself so as to be poised to respond to perturbations in a scale-free manner (Bak, 1996). In
505 the context of consciousness science, there is a possibility to build on the global neuronal
506 workspace theory (Changeux, 2017), especially its key concept of “ignition” of widespread
507 neural activity (Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux, & Dehaene, 2020). This could be a neural
508 process by which irruptions are scaled up to a relevant level of the whole brain.
509
510 These examples serve to illustrate that an irruption could occur at a microscopic scale, such
511 that it would be practically unobservable, yet that it could still have consequences for the
512 macroscopic scale of brain-body-environment interaction. Future work will need to work
513 out a more detailed neurophysiological account of this scalability.
514

11
515 2.2.4 Attunement Thesis
516
517 Irruptions cannot directly control or govern the body’s material processes; they can only
518 serve to counteract existing constraints by underdetermining them. Scaling irruptions up to
519 a level that is relevant for behavior does not change this; they can loosen the organization
520 of the current behavior but cannot direct the formation of the behavior that is to come. And
521 yet, we nevertheless find that our bodily activity spontaneously tends to be a relevant
522 realization of our subjective life. How is this possible?
523
524 The general shape of the solution to this control conundrum can be found in existing work
525 on embodied cognition, such as meta-stable attunement (Bruineberg, Seifert, Rietveld, &
526 Kiverstein, 2021), implicit body memory at the individual and collective levels (Froese &
527 Izquierdo, 2018; T. Fuchs, 2012), and habits (Ramírez-Vizcaya & Froese, 2020). It is often
528 assumed that relevant action requires a forward-looking central controller, but it does not
529 necessarily depend on a representation of future possibilities. Rather, the Attunement
530 Thesis holds that, essentially, our embodiment has been shaped by its history of interactions
531 to such an extent that the body is capable of appropriate movements for most situations, so
532 much so that even feedback loops are often not needed (Mojica & Froese, 2021). One
533 possibility is to cash out more sophisticated forms of attunement, such as a tendency
534 toward optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances simultaneously, using a suitably
535 adjusted version of the Free Energy Principle (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014). The status of
536 the Free Energy Principle with respect to the kind of enactive cognitive science that has
537 inspired much of Irruption Theory remains contentious (Di Paolo, Thompson, & Beer, 2021),
538 but future work could draw on its formalisms (Kiverstein, Kirchhoff, & Froese, 2022), e.g., to
539 capture how the neutral openings created by irruptions are closed with relevant activity.
540
541 As a more minimal proof of concept of attunement, consider Ashby’s (1960) classic non-
542 representational account of adaptive behavior in terms of instability-dependent stochastic
543 changes or “breaks” in its organization. An even more compelling demonstration comes
544 from work on artificial neural networks with unsupervised associative learning, such as
545 Hebbian learning (i.e., “neurons that fire together wire together”). When all the network’s
546 neural states are occasionally set to an arbitrary configuration – approximating a scaled-up
547 irruption – and then allowed to converge again, the network will undergo a process of
548 generalization over its own set of attractors (Watson, Buckley, & Mills, 2011). It is a process
549 of self-optimization of the attractor landscape such that it increases the network’s chances
550 of converging into state configurations that better coordinate the constraints imposed by
551 the original state space. The conditions for this process are surprisingly simple, such that it
552 can be replicated in various neural network architectures (Morales & Froese, 2020;
553 Woodward, Froese, & Ikegami, 2015; Zarco & Froese, 2018). The model can also be
554 combined with self-organized criticality as the mechanism that scales up the irruptions that
555 set the neuronal states to arbitrary values (Shpurov & Froese, 2021).
556
557 These models of neural self-optimization still abstract away from embodiment, which is an
558 important task for future work (Zarco & Froese, 2018). Yet Irruption Theory can already
559 draw inspiration from a tradition in agent-based simulation models, which illustrate that the
560 agent’s capacity to temporarily neutralize material-organizational constraints on the body’s
561 processes can be beneficial for adaptive behavior. For example, it can facilitate the

12
562 transition from too restrictive coping to a more open susceptibility to alternative task
563 demands (Di Paolo & Iizuka, 2008), and even just a neutralization of the influence of sensory
564 or motor areas can facilitate action switching (Agmon & Beer, 2014). Intelligent action does
565 not depend on a central controller but can emerge from a network of habits, which enables
566 appropriate behavior to be solicited by the situation (Ramírez-Vizcaya & Froese, 2020). Once
567 our material bodies have become appropriately attuned, by evolution, development, and/or
568 learning, the unfolding of future behavior can then be largely offloaded into the affordances
569 and constraints of the agent-environment system. For example, the way in which an agent is
570 embodied in the environment can condition the relative stability of its interaction patterns:
571 a change in body morphology can spontaneously lead to a transition to the corresponding
572 sensorimotor interaction pattern (Izquierdo & Buhrmann, 2008).
573
574 Irruption Theory will need to flesh out these computerized thought experiments about
575 attunement and validate them in actual neurophysiological terms. For this purpose, it will
576 be useful to build on existing theories that closely link consciousness with associative
577 learning (Cleeremans, 2011; Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019). In particular, the self-organizing
578 metarepresentational account (Cleeremans et al., 2020), according to which consciousness
579 is something that the brain learns to do by redescribing its neural activity to itself, could be
580 reinterpreted in nonrepresentational terms in the form of the self-optimization process.
581
582 3. Future directions
583
584 This final section sketches some potential applications and points to further developments
585 of Irruption Theory that could be targets of future research.
586
587 The focus of this initial presentation of the framework of Irruption Theory has been on the
588 concept of irruptions in the context of normal subjective involvement, but an immediate
589 area of further development is in psychopathology. The four theses that were proposed
590 lend themselves to developing new ways of thinking about different kinds of pathological
591 situations in terms irruptions.
592
593 • For example, if for a person’s embodiment were to become closed off to irruptions,
594 it would thereby limit their opportunities for subjective involvement in embodied
595 action. This could provide a fresh perspective on subjective reports by people with
596 major depression disorder of being trapped in dead bodies (T. Fuchs, 2005),
597 saturated bodies (Osler, 2021), and lacking a sense of agency (Ratcliffe, 2015).
598
599 • Conversely, some people’s embodiment may be overly sensitive to irruptions, which
600 would presumably lead to instability and as the mechanisms for attunement become
601 overwhelmed. Along this line of reasoning, we can develop a fresh perspective on
602 the long-standing debate about why it is the case that subjective involvement in
603 skilled behaviors can often be counterproductive (Hutto & Sánchez-García, 2015).
604
605 • The extent of subjective involvement in the body may also unstably fluctuate
606 between these two extremes, from nearly absent to overwhelming, with consequent
607 switching between catatonic rigidity and psychotic destabilization, which is
608 characteristic of the two poles of schizophrenia (Sass, 1992; Stanghellini, 2004).

13
609
610 • In the case of normal occurrence of irruptions but that somehow no longer lead to
611 appropriate behavior, we could consider whether the body’s conditions for scaling
612 up irruptions and/or attunement have become physiologically and/or externally
613 deteriorated, such as perhaps occurs during the loss of self in dementia (Gallagher &
614 Marcel, 1999).
615
616 Irruption Theory also lends itself to developing novel approaches to the largely unexplained
617 efficacy of therapeutic interventions that mimic underdetermination caused by irruptions:
618
619 • For example, people with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suffer from
620 being forced into certain thoughts and behaviors against their own will. Patients are
621 known to greatly benefit from deep brain stimulation – an interference in neural
622 activity that artificially increases underdetermination with respect to past neural
623 states – and which has the effect of opening them up again to a broader landscape
624 of affordances (de Haan, Rietveld, Stokhof, & Denys, 2013).
625
626 • Similarly, the efficacy of psychedelic therapy – an intervention that significantly
627 increases neural entropy (Carhart-Harris, 2018) – has been interpreted in terms of an
628 undermining of the habitual self (Ramírez-Vizcaya & Froese, 2019) and as pattern
629 breaking (Hipólito, Mago, Rosas, & Carhart-Harris, 2022).
630
631 Although the current priority of Irruption Theory is to develop a scientific framework that
632 makes room for genuine subjectivity in the natural sciences, future work should consider
633 the complementary direction of interaction. It remains to be clarified what this irruption-
634 based conception of subjective involvement means for the phenomenological study of
635 conscious agency. The irruption of unruly neural dynamics is not accessible to lived
636 experience, nor are the subsequent dynamics that coordinate the next behavior (Varela,
637 1995). Yet perhaps we can try to make sense of the felt effort associated with conscious
638 agency (Hanna & Maiese, 2009) as the subject striving to make a difference by investing its
639 subjective dimension against the material dimension of its embodiment.
640
641 More generally, the tradition of phenomenological philosophy has long emphasized that
642 there is an irreducible alterity at work in consciousness (Zahavi, 2020). This alterity is a
643 shadow of the self-reference intrinsic to self-awareness, which entails that consciousness is
644 necessarily only incompletely self-transparent. This limit on self-transparency has also been
645 associated with the fact that consciousness is embodied, and that embodiment makes a
646 difference for the structures of lived experience.
647
648 Accordingly, there is a mutual displacement of subjectivity and materiality: while the
649 irruption of subjective involvement into the body is manifested indirectly in terms of its
650 increased material-organizational underdetermination, the bodily constraints on
651 consciousness are indirectly experienced as a relative absence of self-awareness, i.e., as a
652 mental automaticity, opacity, and otherness (Froese, 2018). It is via this complementary
653 under-specification of the domains of consciousness and of matter that each of us can
654 intertwine our dimensions of lived and living embodiment into a meshed existence that
655 manages to respect each domain’s specificity – not one, not two. We usually live this

14
656 twofold embodiment in our daily lives without existential contradiction; the challenge posed
657 by Irruption Theory is to also think this twofold embodiment in a consistent manner, while
658 resisting the oversimplifications of both monism and dualism.
659
660
661 Acknowledgements
662
663 The development of Irruption Theory benefited from countless interactions, and I thank the
664 many people who have shaped that journey. In recent years I am particularly indebted to
665 Shigeru Taguchi, for encouraging me to let go of some of my long-held theoretical biases,
666 and to Takashi Ikegami, for giving me the confidence to embrace the unorthodox scientific
667 approach that resulted from that change of mind. I have also benefited from feedback
668 generously provided by audiences after several presentations of earlier versions of Irruption
669 Theory, and especially from critical discussions with members of the Embodied Cognitive
670 Science Unit; Katja Sangati, Mark James, and Sebastien Lerique provided detailed comments
671 on an earlier version of this text.
672
673 Conflict of interest statement. None declared.
674
675
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