The Gravity of Empowerment: Synthesizing Neural Criticality, Gastric Spacetime, and Causal Model Construction in Human Development
The developmental trajectory from early childhood to adulthood is characterized by profound cognitive and physiological transformations, historically studied in isolation across cognitive psychology and network biophysics. While cognitive models emphasize “empowerment gain”—the intrinsic motivation to construct accurate causal models by maximizing the mutual information between an agent’s actions and environmental outcomes—the biophysical substrates required to thermodynamically support this massive computational scaling have remained elusive. This paper introduces a novel interdisciplinary framework synthesizing the principles of neural criticality with the analogue gravity dynamics of the gut-brain axis. We propose that the maturing human brain’s progression toward self-organized criticality is fundamentally anchored by the concurrent maturation of the Enteric Nervous System.