The interoception-and-allostasis theory of everything

What is the mapping between the biological behavior of the brain and body and the resulting psychological phenomena? One common approach in the history of psychology has been to seek specific brain mechanisms corresponding to observed psychological phenomena. For example, we see that people have emotions, so there must be emotion circuits in the brain. We see that people have memory, so there must be a memory part of the brain. Etc. In this view, each psychological phenomenon that we observe is produced by some dedicated neural circuit, module, or collection of neurons that are built to produce that phenomenon, which they do by enacting preprogrammed behaviors upon being triggered that somehow produce the phenomenon in question.

This idea of the brain is intuitive because it assumes that the brain is built the way that humans build things. A kitchen, for example, consists of distinct appliances with distinct forms and dedicated functions that barely overlap. The sink does water, the stove does heat, the refrigerator does preservation, etc. If the refrigerator breaks, this will not affect the sink, nor can the sink be used to do some of task of preservation. The kitchen model of the brain is the idea that the brain is built similarly, with distinct mental appliances for perception, for cognition, for motor behavior, for language, etc.

Psychological constructionism rejects the kitchen model of the brain because it does poorly in light of the evidence. Rather than hypothesizing the existence dedicated brain systems that amazingly happen to coincide with our observer categories of psychological phenomena, constructionism has found evidence for the existence of large-scale brain networks dedicated to interoception and allostasis. The really radical idea of psychological constructionism is that all psychological phenomena are produced by interoception and allostasis. That is to say, there’s one general process going on in the brain, a process of interoception and allostasis, and everything that results from that, like cognition, action, perception, and memory, are all the products of this one general process.

Allostasis means the efficient allocation of internal resources. In other words, it refers to the operation of the internal economy. An internal economy requires signals to be constructed and shared among the members of the economy to serve as a cognitive glue. These signals are called interoceptive signals, and the process of constructing and sharing them is called interoception.

Interoception and allostasis occur throughout a body to produce coordinated activities. Human observers them chop those activities up into categories that we find useful. These categories include, but are not limited to: perception, cognition, action, memory, language, and emotion. There are of course many further subcategories, like fear and anger being emotion categories. The point is that there isn’t any fundamental distinction between these categories; they aren’t natural kinds; they don’t carve reality at its joints. They’re all just stuff-that-manifests-as-a-consequence-of-interoception-and-allostasis, and then we put labels on them because we like labeling things.

The interoception-and-allostasis theory of psychological phenomena was created in the context of understanding emotion, but it’s a more general theory that applies to everything a mind might do:

I hypothesize that the same processes are at work when the brain creates an instance of emotion and when it creates non-emotion states. When a brain constructs an ad hoc category by reimplimenting prior instances where it escaped from a predator, for example, then it is constructing a situation-specific concept for evading a predator, which we call ‘fear’. That concept is a set of hypotheses, or a plan, that includes action preparation. It anticipates the needs of the body and attempts to meet those needs before they arise (a plan for allostasis). And it includes predictions of the sensory consequences that will result from those movements. In effect, the ad hoc fear concept is a functional state of fear that is preparing the animal to act and experience the world in a specific way.

I think the idea of plans as sets of hypotheses fits really well with the collective intelligence perspective. Many individual plans get constructed by the individual cells, and those plans interact to produce group-level plans. Each plan is a hypothesis because plans are predictions about what actions will produce what perceptions. Getting every element of the system to contribute its own ideas and knowledge to the system-level problem-solving process is key to intelligence and successful behavior.

I don’t believe there is any way to directly read out the allostatic predictions made by the interoceptive signals. The interoceptive equilibrium does not carry its meaning with it. Instead, the set of interoceptive signals that do allostasis are a relationally meaningful collection that are anticipated to achieve collective goals because of how the members of the collective are expected to interact with the signals, and because of how the resulting collective behavior is expected to interact with the environment. In short, the signals say something like “this is what works in this situation” rather than having some definite meaning.

The interoception-and-allostasis theory of everything also connects to collective intelligence theory because allostasis is the efficient allocation of internal resources, and an efficient allocation of resources requires a price system, aka, a cognitive glue. The activities of the cognitive glue are what do allostasis, and therefore are responsible for all psychological phenomena. Additionally, they’re also responsible for all of the non-psychological outputs of the system, suggesting a unity between cognitive and non-cognitive behavior. Moreover, because allostasis is the allocation of scarce internal resources, and economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the interoception-and-allostasis theory of everything suggests that the general background theory of cognitive phenomena is economics.