Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity

Hello and welcome. This is Active Inference Guest Stream number 43.1. It's May 11th, 2023, and we're here with Tom Froese. Today we're going to be talking about the paper Eruption Theory, a novel conceptualization of the inactive account of motivated activity. We're going to walk and talk through the paper and there will be a lot of time for questions, so please feel free to add any in the live chat. Thank you, Tom, for joining and to you for an introduction and overview. Okay, thank you. So yeah, hello everybody. My name is Tom Froese. I'm the head of the Body Cognitive Science Unit at the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology. I'm a graduate university in Japan and the scientific mission of our unit overall is to take the advances, the theoretical advances in cognitive science that are sometimes brought together under 4E cognition. So that's embodied, embedded, extended and active approaches to cognition, which to our minds are on the right track in terms of how we should think about the mind and how it relates to the world. But so far, I haven't gotten a lot of exposure and experimental work. And so our unit is basically trying to become an interface where we can do exciting work on the theory side of things and then try them out and experimental work. And we have work on human computer interaction, we have EEG brain imaging, we do sensory substitution research, there's all kinds of stuff about behavioral coordination and social settings and haptics. And so it's very exciting place to be, because we're kind of sticking our necks out a little bit and saying, you know, do all these cool ideas that we love and cherish actually make a difference in how, you know, science is done in the lab. And that's, you know, that's why we're here. But at the same time, what that kind of ambition makes clear is that some of the theoretical work also needs to adapt and change and advance, such that it more directly connects with the kind of things that we can do experimentally. And so the current paper that we're going to discuss is one of those outcomes where I'm trying to think a little bit more clearly about how we can operationalize some of the ideas that are coming out of the inactive approach, such that we can start thinking about how to formalize them and how to even measure them using something like, you know, analysis of EEG signals. Awesome. Very cool theory and practice. And there's a lot of prose papers and a lot of philosophy. And so it's just very exciting, even with the technologies you mentioned, like how this really comes into play and how it does make a difference. So what's the story with this paper? How did it come to be? And where does it fit into that broader work of the group? Yeah, sure. So let's zoom out just a little bit before I go to the specific paper. So for most of my career, I've been working on work, like we could say origins, you know, origins of life, origins of mind, origins of social cognition, origins of social complexity. And I think that kind of look at origins is shared quite widely among my colleagues. So what we want to understand is what are the conditions, the necessary and sufficient conditions for there to be a living being, for there to be agency, for there to be sense making or participatory sense making. And so for most of my career, I've been looking at developing ideas about what are those conditions. And in the background, there was always this assumption that that's pretty much all the work that we need to do in order to have a coherent notion of, let's say, agency, in the sense that notions such as active versus passive, or going back to Alvin Nooy's famous book, action and perception, which was like, you know, the super hot book when I was a PhD student, and it was discussed so widely. We never really question what is the action part of this. So how do we define something as being active versus passive? Yeah, there are some ideas about regulation and normativity, things can go…