The True Nature of Subjective and Objective Experience?

Dr. Froese is one of those remarkably smart people whose way with complicated topics, and sense of civility, make discussion a real pleasure. His work on “Irruption” struck me immediately, and reminded me of a term co-authors and I coined for a series of books based on “Irrelationship”—a form of shared relationship dysfunction based on something very like irruption, gaps in awareness creating a confusional state which drives relationship conflict. More prosaically, ensubtitled How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships To Hide From Intimacy, speaking to the often familiar way we avoid the very things, often unwittingly, and sometimes by unconscious design or function.

We had spoken on our podcast (Doorknob Comments, link below) and explored how people may be hindered in everyday life by forces of irruption, a sudden or violent invasion, or ecologically, a rapid rise in the population or influx of a species into a territory. Merriam-Webster illustrates the latter with a vision of young snowy owls irrupting after a lemming rush. Malthusian dynamics come to mind, the cycle of predator and prey looking very much like the dynamics of an internal combustion engine.

After our conversation, Dr. Froese was generous with his responses to the questions it raised, below. As with the podcast, I am left with more questions, as I tend to think that it is possible to capture subjective experience using empirical approaches in such a way that we would “know” that we shared that experience. To use the classic example of whether when I see orange it is the same quale — is your orange my orange, and vice versa? We would both know, and we would also trust that we knew we both knew.

Feel free to skip to the interview if the preamble is too abstruse, as the Q&A stands by itself, or read as an afterword.

There is always room for doubt. I can feel conscious to myself and wonder if that is an illusion. I can be sure I am really conscious, but doubt my conviction in the reality of the other. Or perhaps I could imagine my consciousness were illusory, and the other’s more real.

This capacity for doubt itself is a quality of the human experience, mind, brain and culture. I wonder whether much of our uncertainty regarding philosophical principles as applied to the everyday world is more a function of the way our thinking works, as much as they are a function of reality.

Perhaps the closest contact we have to material reality is in the brain and body interacting with the brain and body—the only part of the physical world we can touch directly, through self-access. As contrasted with the constructed world of perception, and the immaterial world of spiritual knowledge (which doesn’t work for me, personally), self-interaction is mediated the least, giving the cleanest signal. This idea came to me in wondering how human beings come up with math, which (as Wigner pointed out), is unreasonably effective in the natural sciences.

This brain-on-brain empirical process is something which seems to me to be hard to completely doubt, and harder to study. That is where the irruption is lowest and the absorption highest. A place where subjectivity and objectivity come as close to unification as they can be. Call irruption Ir, absorption Ab, subjective S, and objective O. As Ir approaches zero, Ab approaches its maximum, and S approaches O. The seam closing.

As an interventional psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I have a strange juxtaposition of perspectives — seeing folks recover often dramatically over 1–5 days of accelerated TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), and then progressively develop along a different trajectory in the years following. The profound connection between empiric reality and subjective experience has been sharply underscored. What is most striking is the sudden change in being and becoming — the fast experiential shift in subjective reality, with downstream changes in what happens for them in the world.

Is there always a sliver of doubt? A black box? Or is the doubt itself the illusion? Right now we don’t have the tech to answer questions like this, but for the first time in human history such technology appears within our horizons — depending, perhaps, on the math.

Back to “Irr.” Consider the other words that start with this prefix, which (from Latin) means “not,” “opposite of,” “without.” So, without further ado, the interview.

Grant H Brenner: What are some of the core ideas we need to know to understand your model — things like embodied cognition, or the basics of what you measure?

TF: Irruption theory starts from a single, bold axiom: the subjective mind genuinely matters to how we behave — and it does so in a way that can’t be reduced to brain activity alone. Most theories of the mind–body relation end up outsourcing the mind’s contribution to physiological factors, but that comes at a steep price — you lose what makes the mind’s contribution distinctive, namely its subjective, intentional, and normative character. Irruption theory insists on what I call the participation criterion: the presence of the subjective mind must make a unique difference compared to its absence.

Think about it this way. There is clearly a categorical difference between actively reaching for a cup and having your arm jerk involuntarily. But what difference does that mental involvement actually make at the level of behavior generation? The key insight is that this combination of genuine efficacy with irreducibility means the differences will show up as falling outside the body’s local frame of reference. In other words, mental causation is an irruption into state dynamics — it causes deviations from the expected trajectories of physiological inertia.

So if we want to see the mind at work in the brain, we need to perform a kind of figure–ground reversal: it is precisely the spontaneous activity without observable physical causes that is the most likely signature of the mental.

The same logic applies in the other direction — to the hard problem of consciousness. We can trace observable chains of cause and effect from an external stimulus through various brain regions until, at some point, there is an unexpected reduction in downstream variability. That is the moment the subject reports a change: “Oh — now I see it!” In other words, there was an effect, but it was one we cannot directly observe in the brain. It was absorbed into consciousness.

GHB: Why does this matter to someone who isn’t immersed in this field?

TF: It matters because we all have to live with the fact that our existence is a strange mixture of subjective and objective phenomena — and that mixture is not fully under our control.

Take the example of a panic attack. You have the sense that you are losing control, and every attempt to get a better grip feels futile — it makes the disconnect even worse, threatening a spiral of increasing destabilization. The paradox is that to regain control, the best thing to do is let go. Why should that be?

Irruption theory gives a direct answer: cognitive effort is associated with increased irruptions, which effectively inject noise into physiological dynamics and make it harder for the conditions of perceptual stability to settle. We see the same effect in choking under pressure in professional sports — athletes need to train their minds in addition to their bodies.

The sports example is helpful in a more general sense, too. Once we recognize that there is an irreducible intention–action gap, we can take practical steps to help our body do the right thing at the right time — and that means cultivating an appropriate context and history of interactions to create the right poise. It also means we shouldn’t beat ourselves up when our behavior fails to align with our intentions. Instead, we need to invest in improving the conditions for future behavior.

GHB: OK, let’s get a little jiggy — but not mystical. What is the experience of irruption and absorption actually like, from a subject’s perspective? Say, walking down the street in a big city?

TF: The subjective side of things is currently the least developed part of irruption theory, but it’s ripe for integration with existing traditions that deal with the conscious–unconscious interface. The key is to recognize that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between what happens in the body and what shows up in experience — there is a kind of structural twist.

When the mind irrupts into physiological dynamics and makes the body deviate from its typical trajectories, this does not feel like an irruption of the body into the mind. Rather, irruption into the body is associated with an absorption of mental variability — increased focus, attention, and intention. And when the transaction goes the other way, when physiological variability is absorbed into consciousness, what we experience is not a decrease in experiential richness but rather an irruption of spontaneous affective change — a feeling that seemingly comes from nowhere.

These transactions usually unfold beneath our notice, but they can surface in unusual moments. In the mind-to-body direction, we sometimes surprise ourselves with our own actions. I can chat with the person in the queue next to me while reaching for my coffee, blissfully unaware of how my hand and fingers need to curl to firmly grab the cup — and yet to my surprise I find I am already holding it, ready to drink. We have no direct experience of how our intentions make a difference to our brains or muscles, and yet our movements flexibly self-assemble around them. In the body-to-mind direction, Francisco Varela gave the example of walking down a street, all relaxed, until the hand reaching into the pocket does not find the wallet in its usual place. In that moment there is a surge of inchoate affectivity irrupting into awareness, and the entire lifeworld gets reoriented with dizzying speed — the mind racing back to where the wallet was last used, perhaps while distractedly buying a coffee.

And even when these transactions do register, the lived changes are typically woven straight into meaningful content — integrated into our history of experiences and our network of associations, almost before we notice. But occasionally the irruptions retain their raw, inchoate character and show up in their otherness. That can be a source of creativity, but it can at times also become overwhelming. It is here, in this irreducible gap, that we can trace the human capacity for self-transcendence — but also our vulnerability to conditions like schizophrenia.

GHB: What would happen if I could see my Irruption Coefficient on my smartphone — from a ring or watch — the way I already track steps, sleep quality, and heart rate variability? What would the utility be, and how might it change my relationship to my own consciousness?

TF: I’ve often wondered about the possibility of an “irruption meter” — especially with the growing market for consumer-grade EEG headsets. Ideally, it could reveal when we are truly mentally engaged in what we’re doing, actively participating in behavior generation, as opposed to moments of absent-mindedness, passivity, and running on autopilot. It could give us a real-time sense of how much cognitive effort we are investing over the course of a day. And if our irruption baseline shifted notably higher or lower over time, that could serve as an early warning sign — a reason to seek professional help.

Even before the baseline shifted that dramatically, smaller day-to-day variations could be useful in their own right. If I noticed my readings running elevated by the evening, that might be a cue to make sure I get a good night’s sleep. And if the trend persisted, it could prompt me to take some time off, or to invest more seriously in compensatory practices like meditation.

I can also imagine more focused, task-level applications. Looking back over a day, I could see which activities engaged me most — where I was truly present and actively participating, as opposed to running on autopilot. That would tell me both which tasks matter to me and which are most cognitively demanding, and I could adjust my workflow accordingly. The same logic carries over to education: a student could see which parts of their studies drew the deepest engagement, and use that signal to decide where to invest more time in the future.

GHB: Is there anything beyond the ken of human imagination? Something a person could only imagine encountering, but could never imagine imagining — something outside our maximum experiential envelope?

TF: Yes — there is always more to reality than what shows up in conscious awareness. This limit follows in a principled way from irruption theory: perceptual experience is the outcome of a transaction across the body–mind interface, and that transaction has an informational cost. The irruption of differences into lived experience depends on the absorption of differences on the side of our embodiment. So, paradoxically, the difference that makes the difference cannot itself be part of what becomes present. Intriguingly, this suggests that reality outside of our conscious awareness must be higher-dimensional than the world we experience — which is consistent with the strange objective world painted by contemporary physics.

Notice, too, that the transactional perspective of irruption theory entails that it takes two to tango — it points to a kind of participatory realism. Since perceptual experience occurs when the objective and the subjective make contact in the right way, the perceived world cannot be collapsed into the subjective mind alone. The imagination can never completely substitute for that contact. Some things just have to be experienced to be known.

GHB: What would your theory predict if we found a mechanistic, empirical place where subjective experience and objective reality actually coincide? What would the data look like if the “hard problem” were genuinely solved — say, through a BCI system that gave one person the verified first-hand experience of another, with the ability to reliably modify that experience toward a predetermined state?

TF: The living body is an intelligent system in its own right — it does not need the subjective mind for an astonishing range of sophisticated behavior. But the presence of the subjective mind makes a qualitative difference: the place in the body where subjective and objective phenomena make contact is what I call the embodied mind, and it is characterized by a special form of spontaneity.

The embodied mind introduces an intrinsic indeterminism that runs counter to the body’s usual physiological inertia. On one hand, when the mind is at work in bodily processes, we find irruptions — bursts of variability that are irreducible to preceding physiological causes. On the other hand, when the transaction goes the other way, there is absorption: when bodily processes make a difference to conscious experience, they appear to spontaneously give up some of their expected causal efficacy on downstream physiology, since our instruments cannot measure consciousness directly.

This is where irruption theory sharply parts company with most contemporary approaches to the mind–brain relation. Whether mental states are said to emerge from brain states, to be identical with them, or — in the dominant functionalist accounts — simply to supervene on them, the shared assumption is that specifying the right brain activity is sufficient to specify someone’s experience. On those views, your proposed thought experiment would in principle be realizable: put the brain into the appropriate state and the corresponding first-person experience would follow.

Irruption theory denies that sufficiency. Experience arises from a transaction across the body–mind interface in which both sides play a role, and the mind’s contribution is irreducible to the brain’s. A BCI could do an extraordinary job of reproducing the physiological conditions associated with another person’s experience, and that alone would be remarkable. But because the mind’s contribution cannot be read off from the brain’s state, working on the brain side alone will always remain a partial approximation — the complete, verified first-hand equivalence your thought experiment envisions stays out of reach in principle, not just in practice. Each person’s stream of consciousness is unique and irreproducible.

GHB: Coming back down to earth — where are you headed with your work, and what do you hope others will gain?

TF: We are finally in a position to formally stitch our fragmented contemporary reality back together, spanning all kinds of previously insurmountable boundaries and scales. I envision a day when the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are working on a shared agenda to map out all the relevant transactions — something akin to a large-scale research effort like CERN, but for all of reality, including life and the human condition.

Tom Froese is an Associate Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), where he directs the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit. His research sits at the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, and computational modeling, investigating how consciousness and agency make a measurable difference in the world. He is the originator of irruption theory, a framework for understanding the mind–body relation that has been featured in venues including Big Think and the Landscape of Consciousness.

• Conor Feehly, “Consciousness may be more than the brain’s output — it may be an input, too”, Big Think.

• Irruption theory entry in Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness.

• Tom Froese on The Doorknob Comments Podcast Why You Can’t “Just Do It”: The Intention-Action Gap with Dr. Tom Froese #90

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