The Roots of Rationality: What Makes Adaptive Decision-Making Possible?

What makes adaptive decision-making possible?

That is the central question explored by Rahul Bhui and colleagues (MIT, Brown, UCL, Columbia, NYU) in their 2026 preprint *The Roots of Rationality*.

The paper identifies six adaptive dynamics operating across timescales:
→ Thinking
→ Learning
→ Development
→ Market selection
→ Cultural evolution
→ Genetic evolution

What makes the work particularly important is that the authors openly recognize a core unresolved problem:

"without clear constraints, everything could be explained as optimal in some form."

That challenge is precisely where the ISHEA EICI framework enters the discussion.

Rather than treating adaptation purely as an optimization problem, EICI approaches it as a coherence problem under energetic, informational, and frictional constraints:

EICI = E × I / F

Where:
— E = available energy / resources
— I = informational coherence
— F = frictional resistance

The framework proposes three system regimes:
Δ+1 → coherence
Δ=0 → reorganization threshold
Δ−1 → collapse

Importantly, EICI does not attempt to define universal optimality.

Instead, it measures whether adaptive coherence itself can be maintained across environments and timescales — a distinction directly connected to the No Free Lunch limitations discussed by Bhui et al.

In this sense:
Bhui et al. provide the adaptive taxonomy.
EICI proposes a formal coherence calculus.

Not competing frameworks.
Potentially complementary ones.

Position paper: https://lnkd.in/dtXA9vWA
K-Model cluster: https://lnkd.in/dY8xZmGZ
DOI Trends paper: https://lnkd.in/dM78DxC2

#ComplexSystems #AdaptiveDecisionMaking #CognitiveScience #SystemsTheory #Coherence #ISHEA #OpenScience

---