Froese, Tom and Georgii, Karelin and Takashi, Ikegami

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.

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