If behaviour is not guided by representations, and if value is not meaning, then a familiar picture must be abandoned.
Behaviour is usually imagined as something an organism does: a sequence executed, a plan carried out, a response produced.
This picture is deeply misleading.
Behaviour is not executed.
It is actualised.
The execution myth
The execution picture treats behaviour as:
internally specified,
temporally produced step by step,
and driven from inside the organism outward.
On this view, the world presents inputs, the organism processes them, and behaviour emerges as output.
This picture survives even in supposedly non-representational accounts.
It is wrong at a more basic level.
Behaviour as a cut through possibility
At any moment, an organism is embedded in a dense field of possibilities:
bodily configurations,
environmental affordances,
ongoing perturbations,
historical constraints.
Most of these possibilities are never realised.
Behaviour consists in the selective actualisation of one trajectory rather than another.
Actualisation is not a process
It is tempting to imagine actualisation as something that unfolds over time.
But the work is not done by a sequence of internal steps.
The decisive work is done by the structure of the system at the moment the behaviour occurs.
From this perspective:
the system is a theory of possible instances,
behaviour is one such instance,
and the transition between them is perspectival, not mechanical.
Where coordination comes from
The execution picture struggles to explain coordination:
how many degrees of freedom align at once,
how timing is so precise,
how perturbations are absorbed rather than amplified.
The actualisation picture makes this unsurprising.
Why behaviour looks intelligent
Behaviour looks intelligent because:
the space of possibilities is already structured,
value differentiates viable from non-viable moves,
and the organism–environment system continuously reshapes this structure.
No insight is required.
What we witness is the real-time actualisation of adequacy.
Rethinking control
In execution models, control is centralised.
In actualisation models, control is distributed.
There is no inner controller issuing commands.
Control emerges as the stability of certain trajectories within the constraint landscape.
This is why behaviour can be:
fast,
flexible,
and robust to disruption.
The environment inside the system
Actualisation also dissolves a familiar boundary.
If behaviour is a cut through possibility, then the environment is not external input.
It is part of the system whose possibilities are being cut.
The organism and its environment co-define the space of what can happen next.
What this reframing achieves
By treating behaviour as actualisation rather than execution, we can explain:
coordination without planning,
novelty without invention,
adaptability without representation.
We also remove the temptation to smuggle meaning back in.
Behaviour no longer needs to be about anything.
It only needs to be viable.
What remains to be explained
Two questions now press.
The next post will address the first of these by dissolving another misleading boundary:
the separation of organism and environment.
Behaviour, we will see, does not happen in an environment.
It happens with one.
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