AIM Framework glossary
Behaviour
Canonical definition
Behaviour is what is observable of an Individual's conduct and state. Action is what the Scalar drives out through the effectors, and an action becomes observable as behaviour, so action is a subclass of behaviour and not the whole of it. Behaviour is accordingly the observable conduct and state of an Individual across an interval, whether or not an action is being executed within it. Behaviour is the wider category and action the narrower: every action is behaviour, and behaviour additionally comprises selected non-action, in which the Decision Hub ran and produced disengagement or was intercepted before effector engagement; unselected behaviour, in which observable output arises from layers the value architecture does not govern, such as protective reflexes and autonomic display; and behaviour under suspended selection, in which the operational loop is not running at all, as in sleep. The criterion of membership is third-person observability at the level of the Individual's conduct and state, which is what makes behaviour the evidential channel that operates around Source Opacity. The criterion is not observability at large: what an instrument reads off the substrate is not conduct, and the Behavioural Signatures reach the source composition inferentially rather than by recovering it.
Explanation
A person asleep is behaving. Nothing is being selected, no Scalar is being integrated, and an Appetitive deficit is being repaired throughout; what a third party observes is a state rather than a doing, and it is behaviour on that account. A person who wanted the Object and did not take it is behaving, and what is observable is the not-taking. Behaviour therefore covers the whole interval and not merely the parts of it in which something moved, and it is the interval that carries the diagnostic information: whether pursuit stopped when the Object was obtained, whether it survived the removal of an audience, whether it resumed once recognition dried up. Each of these reads a stretch whose informative feature is that no action occurred in it. A framework that recognised only action would be blind at precisely the points where its diagnostics are sharpest. The three non-action classes. Selected non-action is the class the interventions occupy: an Individual who applies the Two-Question Diagnostic and declines has produced an interval of behaviour and no action, and the interception is the whole of what the Knowledge Patch does at the fast layer. Unselected behaviour is the class the architecture presupposes without modelling, the blink and the flinch among them, together with the autonomic display, the blush and the tremor, that others read as though it were chosen. Behaviour under suspended selection is the class in which the loop is not running; the Individual continues to be observed, and the Appetitive repair that Axiom 6 requires proceeds throughout. What behaviour is not. Phenomenal Affect is not behaviour. It is emitted inside the body and persists there, reaching others only through what the Individual subsequently does or says, which is the channel Confabulation occupies.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.
Derivation
Chapter 4, Section 4.4.1; Chapter 4, Section 4.4.0; Chapter 4, Section 4.4.9.