Emergent Properties: Action in In-Action
How a baby recognizes self-agency
I have meant to share this article since I read it last September, on a study from Florida Atlantic University that examined the moment that babies realize that “they can act with purpose and effect change.” The quest to understand purpose is largely tied to the question of agency and has been the cornerstone of philosophical debate and discussion for thousands of years. The central point of the article instantly reminded me of an idea presented in the Bhagavad Gita:
karmaṇyakarma yaḥ paśhyed akarmaṇi cha karma yaḥ
sa buddhimān manuṣhyeṣhu sa yuktaḥ kṛitsna-karma-kṛit
Those who see action in inaction, and inaction in action, are the wise among people. Although performing actions, they are yogis and masters of their actions.
While the meaning of the text is quite different than the meaning of the study, one can’t help but see correlates and language, especially when the study co-author Dr. Nancy Jones says “The babies in our study have revealed something really profound: that there is action in the midst of inaction, and inaction in the midst of action.”
The article from Technology Networks said:
“The new approach used in this study frames agency as an emergent property from the functional coupling of organism and environment. Researchers took a deep dive into the baby-mobile interaction through the eyes of Coordination Dynamics – Kelso and colleagues’ theory of how complex living things are coordinated (from cells to society) and how function and order emerge.”
Emergent properties of consciousness is a profound idea that examines self-organizing principles of intelligence that bond together based on purpose. Cells bind together to form organs, tissues, bodies, animals, etc. Each layer of organization has its purpose that supports the whole. (Dr. Neil Theise has written on this extensively.)
What they found was that it was not just a baby’s recognition of agency that led to purposeful movement, but the pauses in between movements, and that “the emergence of agency is a punctuated self-organizing process, with meaning found both in movement and stillness.”
Dr. Jones continued by saying that, “The coordination dynamics of movement and stillness jointly constitute the unity of the baby’s conscious awareness – that they can make things happen in the world. Intentionally.”
I think this is an important clue for positive integration for us as adults, too, that we need to spend time in deliberate stillness to understand our agency within action. When we act in such a way that our actions stem from deliberate awareness, arising from quiet stillness, those actions will perhaps be peaceful and in alignment with the world and nature. When we begin to ignore, as we often do, where agency arises from, we can act from places within ourselves that are not quiet, not grounded, and those actions either create turbulence with people or in the world in general or leave us feeling dissatisfied with the way we have acted.
The babies in this study were in a crib with a string tied to their ankles, and when they moved their ankles, the mobile would move. They observed this, paused, and then moved again. Imagine if we could observe the simple cause and effect of our actions, just like the babies in this study. It’s a nice idea to meditate on!
References:
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/study-captures-eureka-moment-when-babies-learn-they-have-agency-378971
Sloan AT, Jones NA, Kelso JAS. Meaning from movement and stillness: Signatures of coordination dynamics reveal infant agency. PNAS. 2023;120(39):e2306732120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2306732120