Speaker: Tom Froese (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)
Tom Froese is Associate Professor at OIST and head of the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit (ECSU). His research develops the embodied and enactive tradition of cognitive science and has produced a novel theoretical framework “irruption theory” for how the subjective mind makes a difference to the living body (Froese, 2026). At ECSU, this framework anchors a linked research program spanning philosophy of mind, human-subject experimentation, computational modeling, and cross-scale empirical analysis.
The central claim of irruption theory is simple but consequential. Because the subjective mind is not reducible to physiology, its involvement can only manifest, from the perspective of physiological inertia, as an external noise term: an irruption of divergent dynamics. This reframes a longstanding tension in embodied cognitive science: the expectation that subjective involvement should show up as measurable benefit in brain and behavior, where experiments often reveal the opposite, a disordering effect. Irruption theory proposes that this disordering is exactly the signature we should expect, and recasts the problem of mental causation as a question about how living systems self-organize despite, and through, such irruptions.
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Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
The meeting will be held in English.
Participation is strongly recommended for students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and for students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.
Where: Online
When: 14/04/2027 – TBA CET
Attendance: Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is needed by email [angelica.kaufmann@unimi.it]