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30Making sense of the chronology of Paleolithic cave painting from the perspective of material engagement theoryPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (1): 91-112. 2019.There exists a venerable tradition of interdisciplinary research into the origins and development of Paleolithic cave painting. In recent years this research has begun to be inflected by rapid advances in measurement techniques that are delivering chronological data with unprecedented accuracy. Patterns are emerging from the accumulating evidence whose precise interpretation demands corresponding advances in theory. It seems that cave painting went through several transitions, beginning with the…Read more
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22Life is Precious Because it is Precarious: Individuality, Mortality and the Problem of MeaningIn Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic & Raffaela Giovagnoli (eds.), Representation of Reality: Humans, Other Living Organism and Intelligent Machines, Springer. 2017.Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual with a potential that is intrinsic to biological existence: death. Life matters to such an individual because it must constantly create the conditions of its own existence, which is unique and irreplaceable. For that individual to actively adapt, rather than to …Read more
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33Interactively guided introspection is getting science closer to an effective consciousness meterConsciousness and Cognition 22 (2): 672-676. 2013.The ever-increasing precision of brain measurement brings with it a demand for more reliable and fine-grained measures of conscious experience. However, introspection has long been assumed to be too limited and fallible. This skepticism is primarily based on a series of classic psychological experiments, which suggested that more is seen than can be retrospectively reported , and that we can be easily fooled into retrospectively describing intentional choices that we have never made . However, t…Read more
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91Imitation by social interaction? Analysis of a minimal agent-based model of the correspondence problemFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 6. 2012.
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26How passive is passive listening? Toward a sensorimotor theory of auditory perceptionPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (4): 619-651. 2020.According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on …Read more
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139Hume and the enactive approach to mindPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (1): 95-133. 2009.An important part of David Hume’s work is his attempt to put the natural sciences on a firmer foundation by introducing the scientific method into the study of human nature. This investigation resulted in a novel understanding of the mind, which in turn informed Hume’s critical evaluation of the scope and limits of the scientific method as such. However, while these latter reflections continue to influence today’s philosophy of science, his theory of mind is nowadays mainly of interest in terms …Read more
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55From synthetic modeling of social interaction to dynamic theories of brain–body–environment–body–brain systemsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (4). 2013.Synthetic approaches to social interaction support the development of a second-person neuroscience. Agent-based models and psychological experiments can be related in a mutually informing manner. Models have the advantage of making the nonlinear brainenvironmentbrain system as a whole accessible to analysis by dynamical systems theory. We highlight some general principles of how social interaction can partially constitute an individual's behavior
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52Enactive neuroscience, the direct perception hypothesis, and the socially extended mindBehavioral and Brain Sciences 38. 2015.Pessoa'sThe Cognitive-Emotional Brain(2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that complements other developments in cognitive science, especially enactivism. Both accept complexity as essential to mind; both tightly integrate perception, cognition, and emotion, which enactivism unifies in its foundational concept of sense-making; and both emphasize that the spatial extension of mental processes is not reducible to specific brain regions and neuroanatomical connectivity. An enactive neu…Read more
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25Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mindArtificial Intelligence 173 (3-4): 466-500. 2009.
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16Book Review: Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World (review)Frontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.
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40Book Review: Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind (review)Frontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.
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68Bio-machine Hybrid Technology: A Theoretical Assessment and Some Suggestions for Improved Future Design (review)Philosophy and Technology 27 (4): 539-560. 2014.In sociology, there has been a controversy about whether there is any essential difference between a human being and a tool, or if the tool–user relationship can be defined by co-actor symmetry. This issue becomes more complex when we consider examples of AI and robots, and even more so following progress in the development of various bio-machine hybrid technologies, such as robots that include organic parts, human brain implants, and adaptive prosthetics. It is argued that a concept of autonomo…Read more
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13Embodied Dyadic Interaction Increases Complexity of Neural Dynamics: A Minimal Agent-Based Simulation ModelFrontiers in Psychology 10. 2019.
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33Time-Series Analysis of Embodied Interaction: Movement Variability and Complexity Matching As Dyadic PropertiesFrontiers in Psychology 7. 2016.
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166In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigat…Read more
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79The Problem of Meaning: The Free Energy Principle and Artificial AgencyFrontiers in Neurorobotic 1. 2022.Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive c…Read more
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206What is ‘the Secret of Life’? The Mind-Body Problem in Čapek’s Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.)In Jitka Cejkova (ed.), Karel Capek’s R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life, Mit Press. forthcoming.One of the recurring themes in Čapek’s play is the existential question of whether the reductionist materialist worldview – the belief that we can fully explain the world, including ourselves, in terms of nothing but physical processes – can accommodate all that is essential to the human being. The materialist worldview triumphed with the scientific revolution, which in turn laid the foundations for the military-industrial complex. This historical shift is represented in the play by the busines…Read more
Tom Froese
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
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Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate UniversityAssistant Professor
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Phenomenology |