Prof. Jun Tani

Cognitive Neurorobotics Research Unit - OIST

Investigating Time Perception through Robotics and Phenomenology

In this talk, I'll discuss the issue of subjective time through lenses of neurorobotics and Husserl's phenomenology.  Especially, the talk will focus on the following question by Husserian, "When the temporality is experienced as a part of flow in the deep level, how can it appear as temporal events and objects in the shallow level?" I'll show my understanding obtained through neurorobotics experiments.

Prof. Takashi Ikegami

Takashi Ikegami Lab - University of Tokyo

Consciousness as Creative Instability

Using a network of large language models (LLMs) as agents, we constructed an agent network that operates behind the humanoid robot ALTER3. 

Marvin Minsky once proposed that the mind is an emergent phenomenon arising from a “society of minds.” In a similar way, we observe emergent units arising from the interactions within the LLM network. Through experiments in which the android communicates with people, we address two questions:

How creativity in ALTER3 emerges through the dynamics of the LLM network.

How an internal unit or sense of self can arise within ALTER3. Finally, we aim to discuss the self-organization of 

subjective time in ALTER3, and how it relates to the emergence of mind-like phenomena.

References

Takahide Yoshida, Atsushi Masumori and Takashi Ikegami, From text to motion: grounding GPT-4 in a humanoid robot “Alter3”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 12, 1581110 (2025).

Takahide Yoshida, Suzune Baba, Atsushi Masumori and Takashi Ikegami, Minimal Self in Humanoid Robot "Alter3" Driven by Large Language Model, Proceedings of the 2024 Artificial Life Conference (Copenhagen July). 

Takashi Ikegami, Suzune Baba, Takahide Yoshida, and Hiroki Kojima, Individuation Through Integration: A PID-Based Study of Androids and Insect Societies (preprint).T

Prof. Tom Froese

Embodied Cognitive Science Unit - OIST

Life as multiscale alignment: From agential irruptions to optimal timing

Living systems are processes that continuously unfold in time and hence must be able to align their actions and component processes in real-time. In this talk I will discuss ongoing work aimed at testing key implications of the irruption theory of motivated activity that have implications for the inherent rhythmicity and intrinsic timescales of biology. 

To get a concrete handle on these characteristic temporal phenomena, I focus on the core capacity of living systems to be sensitive to the unpredictable occurrences of salient events in the background flow of stochastic fluctuations. This conceptual lens opens a fruitful perspective on various empirical domains across spatiotemporal scales, and connects formally with sequential decision frameworks such as the classic 1/e-law.

Prof. Chrystopher Nehaniv 

Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI)

The Algebra of Time for an Agent:  Time as It Could Be

Is there only one possible type of time and temporal experience for an agent? 

We make the case that different models of time are appropriate as models of the temporal experience for different types of agents in different environments and possible worlds. We begin by considering some properties of time from the perspective of a given single agent that rest on philosphical ideas going back to the ancient Greeks. These can be express in terms of dynamical systems theories where the models of time can be any associative algebraic structure such as our usual one-dimensional model of time from physics (the real numbers under addition), or the number of clock ticks elapsed (as, e.g., in cellular automta), but also more exotic non-commutative finite and infinite structure, including reversible and irreversible variants, and cyclical time, as appropriate to modelling the agent's world. We will classify simple models of time, and we will illustrate examples of different kinds of temporal experience and how they relate to one another, including  expansions of temporal models to enlarge ones that can capture the notion of history or narrative.