autonomy  ^{[active draft]  #tbc}

overview

To survive, animals act autonomously.

—but what is autonomy?

environmentally synchronised action

In it’s most basic form, autonomy is conditional action: plural, conditional, stimulus organism response; or dynamic cause and effect

At a high/level, autonomy results from operational (and mechanical) alignment, across plural phenomenal scopes (or levels) of concern ¹ :

1. From the physical environment to physical animal implementation, including interpreted representation
2. From interpreted representation to environmentally synchronised action

as such, the sequence 1-> 2 -> 3, aligns biology and autonomous agency

1. representationally integrated significance
2. operationally aligned motivation
3. environmentally synchronised action

further described below

#todo diagrams

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memory

persistence

Ancestors had memory, which modelled physical environments, sufficient to remember where recognisable (pleasing and displeasing) phenomena were located.

generally, remembering is more efficient than re-discovering ²

map of circumstances

(MOCS)

³

Animal autonomy depends upon an operational ‘map of circumstances’, which must implement behaviour sufficient to :

1. Remember phenomena
   1. Simultaneously arriving stimuli -inform- persisted, accumulated, sensory representation
2. Recognise phenomena
   1. Simultaneously arriving stimuli -match- persisted, accumulated, sensory representation
3. Locate phenomena
   1. The relative positioning of phenomenal occurrences {before; between; beyond}
4. Evaluate phenomenal significance
   1. Memories (of recognisable and locatable phenomena) necessarily include an optional attribute: a measure (of intensity) of phenomenal significance. (Simplified here to pleasing and displeasing)

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operation

synchronisation

circumstantially composed representational scene

Given map of circumstances above: an internal sense of ‘present location’ results from simultaneously arriving stimuli matching (and activating) plural relative-or-adjacent phenomenal representations; as such, simultaneous activation of phenomenal representation results in ‘a circumstantially composed/ active (representational) scene’

physical action

shaping circumstances

Consider muscles :

1. Physical locomotion (and movement generally) requires physical activation of muscles
2. Muscle action depends upon both :
   1. Electrical activation (electrical patterns/ sequences) – instantaneous conditionality
   2. Chemical resources (ATP, etc) – pulsed conditionality (physical material is released into a physical space, and consumed ⁴ By chemical processes over a period of time)

for an animal, the pulsed release of physical material is an embodied condition: analogous to motivational body-state

motivation

representationally integrated significance -> operationally aligned motivation

In any moment, one or more phenomena represented by the presently active circumstantially composed, representational scene, may be pleasing or displeasing

Upon activation (recall) of any memory, any respective measure of (pleasing or displeasing) significance invokes motivational body-state, which directly shapes condition of physical action.

Notes :

• Motivational direction
• Avoidance
• Suppression
• Conflict (complex scenes)

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operational alignment

environmentally synchronised action

interpreted significance -> motivation -> behaviour

Physical action is synchronised with the environment because all motivational body-state and subsequent physical action directly relates to circumstances of the presently active representational scene.

When ‘representationally integrated significance’ becomes ‘operationally aligned motivation’, the result is ’environmentally synchronised action’ :

1. Simultaneously arriving stimuli
2. Match persisted relative, associated representations
3. Of sufficiently significant phenomena
   1. significance is body-evaluated (local resource/ state constraints) to motivation #rewrite
4. Such that chemical resources (of sufficient intensity) are automatically released to muscles
5. Simultaneously as scene appropriate patterns and sequences of electrical activation direct muscles, informed by location aware map of circumstances

#tbc