Philosophies
April 3, 2019
Tom Froese, Shigeru Taguchi
44 citations
The essay critically evaluates progress on the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence and robotics, remaining skeptical that deep neural networks or cognitive robotics fundamentally address it. It agrees with the enactive approach that things appear meaningful for living beings due to their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals, but notes this approach fails to explain how meaning could influence an agent's behavior. If life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, meaning cannot play a causal role. The authors argue this impotence of meaning can be resolved by revising the concept of nature so that the macroscopic scale of the living involves physical indeterminacy, and they consider implications for synthetic approaches.
Frontiers in Pharmacology
December 3, 2020
Daniela Dudysová, Karolína Janků, Michal Šmotek et al.
37 citations
Psilocybin, a serotonergic psychedelic with antidepressant potential, altered sleep architecture in healthy volunteers the night after administration. In a randomized, double-blinded trial, 20 healthy adults (10 women, ages 28–53) received psilocybin or placebo. Psilocybin prolonged REM sleep latency and showed a trend toward reduced total REM sleep duration, with no changes in NREM sleep or whole-night EEG power spectra. Contrary to expectations, psilocybin suppressed slow-wave activity in the first sleep cycle, providing no evidence for sleep-related neuroplasticity. The findings suggest that psilocybin's antidepressant properties may involve sleep changes, possibly through different mechanisms than those of classical antidepressants.
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2018
Ximena Gonzalez-Grandón, Tom Froese
25 citations
Over the past 25 years, embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained scientific legitimacy worldwide, including in Mexico, which offers a fertile environment for their development. This editorial introduction argues that concerns about incoherence among these perspectives are misplaced; instead, 4EC should be viewed as an emerging pluralistic research tradition with shared commitments. The tradition has grown in Mexico due to the country's distinctive historical, scientific, and philosophical development. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the promising potential of heterogeneous explanations within this tradition.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
January 1, 2015
Tom Froese
14 citations
Pessoa's The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) offers an integrative neuroscience approach that aligns with enactivism, a cognitive science framework. Both perspectives treat complexity as central to mind and tightly link perception, cognition, and emotion—enactivism does so through its core concept of sense-making. They also argue that mental processes extend spatially beyond specific brain regions and neuroanatomical connections. An enactive neuroscience is now developing.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2023
Tom Froese, John J Sykes
10 citations
The enactive approach to cognitive science, originally expressed through neurophenomenology, rests on three tenets: phenomenological pragmatics, embodied cognition, and conscious efficacy. Most empirical work has focused only on the first tenet, using improved subjective reports to correlate with brain data, while the second tenet has received less attention and the third has been actively avoided. A critical review of four case studies shows that neurophenomenology falls short of its potential by not demonstrating that lived experience itself makes a difference to the living body's dynamics. The authors propose integrating all three tenets, using conscious efficacy as a pivot, to develop genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
March 27, 2024
Tom Froese
8 citations
The mind and body are one but not the same, related in a way that is efficacious yet non-reducible, non-observable, and non-intelligible. This proposal treats the mind as a hidden 'black box' coupled to the body, introducing two concepts: irruption, where the unobservable mind makes a difference to observable matter, and absorption, where observable matter makes a difference to the unobservable mind. These concepts align with information-theoretic neuroscience, measuring cognitive activity and subjective qualia via entropy and compression respectively. The theory offers responses to the hard problem of consciousness and mental causation from first principles, aiming to set the agenda for future mind sciences.
medRxiv
September 11, 2024
M. Nikolič, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Tom Froese et al.
6 citations
preprint
Psilocybin, a classic psychedelic, alters perception, cognition, and emotion by activating 5-HT2A receptors and reducing serotonin reuptake. In a placebo-controlled crossover study with 20 healthy individuals, electroencephalography tracked brain activity changes over 24 hours after oral psilocybin (0.26 mg/kg). Acutely, absolute power decreased in alpha and beta bands but increased in delta and gamma frequencies; alpha power decreased occipitally between 1 and 3 hours, and beta decreased frontally at 3 hours. Global functional connectivity in the alpha band dropped acutely, while Lempel-Ziv complexity increased at 1 and 1.5 hours.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 5, 2023
Tom Froese, Natalya Weber, Ivan Shpurov et al.
6 citations
preprint
The theory of autopoiesis, influential in theoretical biology and origins of life, has struggled to connect with mainstream biology due to challenges in generating testable hypotheses. Recent developments in the enactive approach have clarified concepts like precariousness, adaptivity, and agency. This paper advances those ideas by integrating thermodynamic principles—reversibility, irreversibility, and path-dependence—and interpreting them through a self-optimization model. Modeling results show how minimal conditions allow a system to reorganize toward coordinated constraint satisfaction. Although abstract, these findings suggest a path for the enactive approach to productively engage with cell biology.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Tom Froese
6 citations
Enactivists argue that genuine intersubjectivity is possible: people can directly participate in each other's experience. Theory of mind approaches to social cognition have improved by incorporating neuroscience and phenomenology, but they still rely on two flawed assumptions: a cognitive unconscious that explains social understanding through subpersonal representational mechanisms, and methodological individualism that limits explanations to processes inside the individual. The enactive approach overcomes these constraints by integrating personal-level phenomenology with multi-scale dynamics within and between subjects, supported by formal and empirical research on social interaction.