From the Explanatory Gap to Behavioural Governance through Bounded Rationality and the AEIOUF Hypercube

This article extends earlier work on The Poetry of Social Work in response to an invitation to develop its  implications for a broader humanities and social sciences framework. It argues that the explanatory gap is  not closed by reduction, whether through neuroscience at the micro level or artificial intelligence at the  macro level, but is more fruitfully approached through a human-centred, living-systems, behavioural economics orientation. Read through Chalmers, Simon, Kahneman and Tversky, Thaler, and the  developing Benjamin–Anderson–Bitetto– Bound programme, the problem is reconfigured from one of  mechanism alone to one of enacted human agency under bounded conditions. The article proposes  CONSCIOUSING as the central term: not “consciousness” in its canonical substantive form, but the  human, deliberative, constructive gerund of considering chances, making Changes a step at a time, and  deciding with CHOICES*. This process is encoded in the critical agentive token <cCC*>, where life  begins as chances, becomes agentively worked through Changes, and culminates in CHOICES*, with the  asterisk denoting decision-points that close a given explanatory gap sufficiently for action to proceed.  Integrating behavioural economics with the AEIOUF Hypercube and the published empirical  contributions of Benjamin and collaborators, the paper argues that private experience remains irreducibly  private in its intrinsic character, yet leaves patterned public footprints in behaviour, commitment and  decision. In a turbulent world, human agency is therefore best understood not as sovereign mastery or  passive mechanism, but as the ongoing practice of consciousing through the bounded transitions of  <cCC*>.