Invited Speakers

*All time is in Japan Standard Time (GMT+9).

Organized Session: TONAL 2026

Organizers	Georgii Karelin (OIST) Milan Rybar (OIST) Moritz Kriegleder (University of Vienna) Luna Wang (OIST)
What if noise is not merely tolerated by life, but embraced—perhaps even essential? This workshop explores the generative and functional roles of randomness and noise in natural and artificial complex adaptive systems. Our central conjecture is that stochasticity is not just a background condition or a nuisance to overcome, but a vital and irreplaceable component of living systems—natural and artificial alike. From random mutations driving evolution to chaotic dynamics in numerical simulations, unpredictability often sits at the heart of emergent complexity. In Artificial Life (ALife), randomness appears in various forms: it may be exogenous (as procedural input), or endogenous (emerging from the system itself during its evolution). In either case, it poses a critical question: If artificial and natural life persistently co-exist with randomness, how might they benefit from it—or even thrive on it? We invite discussion on whether some noise is actively generated or amplified by living systems and whether such noise plays a meaningful, causally efficacious role in the system’s operational closure. By better understanding these dynamics, we may be able to engage with artificial living systems in richer, more meaningful ways. Website (to be updated, for now it displays information about previous TONAL 2025 workshop): https://www.oist.jp/research/research-units/ecsu/alife Email: ecsu.alife@oist.jp

Organizers

Georgii Karelin (OIST)
Milan Rybar (OIST)
Moritz Kriegleder (University of Vienna)
Luna Wang (OIST)

What if noise is not merely tolerated by life, but embraced—perhaps even essential?

This workshop explores the generative and functional roles of randomness and noise in natural and artificial complex adaptive systems. Our central conjecture is that stochasticity is not just a background condition or a nuisance to overcome, but a vital and irreplaceable component of living systems—natural and artificial alike.

From random mutations driving evolution to chaotic dynamics in numerical simulations, unpredictability often sits at the heart of emergent complexity. In Artificial Life (ALife), randomness appears in various forms: it may be exogenous (as procedural input), or endogenous (emerging from the system itself during its evolution). In either case, it poses a critical question: If artificial and natural life persistently co-exist with randomness, how might they benefit from it—or even thrive on it?

We invite discussion on whether some noise is actively generated or amplified by living systems and whether such noise plays a meaningful, causally efficacious role in the system’s operational closure. By better understanding these dynamics, we may be able to engage with artificial living systems in richer, more meaningful ways.

Website (to be updated, for now it displays information about previous TONAL 2025 workshop): https://www.oist.jp/research/research-units/ecsu/alife

Email: ecsu.alife@oist.jp

The following invited speakers will present in this organized session.

Tom Froese
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

(tentative) A novel formalization of the mind-body relation

(tentative) Cognitive neuroscience faces a measurement problem: core features of the human mind cannot be directly observed in the brain. For example, intentions are making a difference in behavior generation but cannot be reduced to sub-personal quantities of neural activity without losing their purpose-driven, normative character: if agency is taken to be efficacious, and if it is not reducible to underlying non-agential factors, then the way that this irreducible efficacy shows up at that underlying level is in terms of unpredictable deviations from physiological tendencies that would otherwise take place. The principled derivation of these deviations - irruptions - provides a fresh perspective on the source of the noisiness of living systems, and highlights the essential role noise plays in the self-organization of adaptive behavior. This conceptual advance reframes context-dependent neural “noise” as a key signature of the mind at work, offering new avenues for research in cognitive science, clinical interventions, and AI.

Biography:

Dr. Tom Froese is a cognitive scientist with a background in artificial life and complex systems theory. His research addresses foundational questions regarding the origin and nature of the human mind by integrating philosophy of mind, computational modeling, and human subjects research.

https://www.oist.jp/research/research-units/ecsu/tom-froese

Mark James
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

(tentative) Shaping Multiscale Self-Organisation through Shocks and Scaffolds

(tentative) Living systems change when patterns are perturbed just enough to loosen entrenched regimes without breaking coordination. This talk develops a theory of dosed noise as a mechanism for realignment across biological, psychological, and social levels. It frames noise, in this context, as a brief, well-timed fluctuation that opens a window for re-coordination of attention, affect, narrative, and action, Using familar examples, we show how endogenous and exogenous shocks and scaffolds can be tuned to canalize these transitions at different scales.

Biography:

Mark's has a PhD in the philosophy of embodied cognitive science, a MA in philosophy and a BA in philosophy and psychology. His PhD work was focused on how culture is reproduced through embodied social interaction. Mark's postdoctoral efforts will focus on questions of wellbeing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the intersection between embodied cognitive science, design and digital technologies.

https://www.markmjames.com