Professor of Cognitive Processes and Systems: Toyin Falola's New Appointment Signals the Way Forward in an Era of Transformative Education

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Professor of Cognitive Processes and Systems

Toyin Falola's New Appointment Signals the Way Forward in an Era of Transformative Education

                             

                           

                           Abstract

The rise of artificial intelligence destabilizes traditional educational paradigms grounded in information transmission and disciplinary mastery. 

As machines increasingly outperform humans in retrieval, analysis, and application of knowledge, education must redefine its purpose. 

This article argues that the future of education lies in the cultivation of integrative human cognition—ethical, interpretive, embodied, and cosmological. 

Using the appointment of Toyin Falola as Professor of Cognitive Processes and Systems as a case study, the essay explores an emerging educational model grounded in transdisciplinarity, ritual archives, embodied knowledge, and dialogical intelligence. 

Situating Falola’s work within broader debates on cognition, pluralistic epistemologies and post-AI education, the article proposes education as the disciplined expansion of human meaning-making capacity in dialogue with artificial intelligence.

Drawing on his multidisciplinary work in African humanities, philosophy, and epistemology, Falola demonstrates how everyday human experiences — from cooking and eating to dance, hairstyles, and ritual — can illuminate universal cognitive processes.

His scholarship, combined with his global collaborative networks, positions him to lead transdisciplinary efforts in developing thinking skills across disciplines and cultures. 

This vision reimagines education as a dialogue between human insight and technological augmentation, fostering deeper existential reflection and epistemic pluralism in an AI-dominated world.

The Crisis of Abundance: Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

With the emergence of AI, what is the future of education as we know it?

Transformation.

In a world in which almost anything can be learnt, any piece of information retrieved and complex bodies of knowledge digested, analyzed and applied in seconds by artificial intelligence, what remains as the rationale for educational systems?

Artificial intelligence has inaugurated an age of epistemic abundance in which information is no longer scarce, slow, or difficult to access. 

This transformation renders obsolete educational systems premised on memorization, content mastery, and siloed expertise. The crisis facing education is therefore not technological but philosophical: what is education for when knowledge is ubiquitous?

The Enduring Human Core: Cultivating Cognitive Capacities Beyond AI

The cultivation of the human ability to develop and apply knowledge, in dialogue with AI as an enhancement of human cognitive capacity rather than a replacement for it, is the future.

Education must now emphasize more than ever:

Critical and creative thinking.

Ethical reasoning and value judgment.

Meaning-making and existential reflection.

Interdisciplinary synthesis and cultural contextualization.

This human-centered approach ensures that AI augments rather than supplants human intelligence.

This article contends that education’s future lies in cultivating the human capacity to think—to integrate information into ethical judgment, cultural meaning, embodied practice, and cosmological orientation.

 AI should be understood not as a replacement for human cognition but as a cognitive amplifier that heightens the urgency of developing interpretive and integrative intelligence.

A Revolutionary Appointment: The Scope and Vision of the Professorship of Cognitive Processes and Systems 

Hence Toyin Falola's appointment as Professor of Cognitive Processes and Systems by a global consortium of universities makes a lot of sense.

The appointment announcement describes the mission of the professorship as that of leading the development of thinking skills in all apects of human life related to the humanities and social sciences, and in their interaction with the sciences, from the experience of rising from bed to that of walking, to eating, to reflecting on the stars in relation to the ultimate meaning of existence.

The Professor of Cognitive Processes and Systems is both a specialist and a synthesist—one who demonstrates how the local opens into the cosmic, how the everyday embodies metaphysics, and how education actualizes a practice of becoming human.

Scholarly Foundations

The statement announcing the appointment referenced five exemplificatory pieces of writing by Falola in the context of his broader multidisciplinary productivity and his work in creating and running collaborative knowledge development systems across continents,  in justifying his appointment to this role.

The Philosophy of the Everyday

His recent essay on Ibibio foods in his reflections on his visit to the artist Victor Ekpuk in his Akwa Ibom, Nigeria home is described as magnificent in reflecting on the philosophical significance of one of the most fundamental, most commonplace and yet most strategic of human activities- cooking and eating.

In treating food as an epistemic site, the essay reveals how the most commonplace human practices encode cosmologies, ethics, histories, and modes of relationality.

 Such work exemplifies a cognitive orientation that refuses to separate the intellectual from the everyday.

Cosmology and Embodied Knowledge

"Terrapolis and Orisha Energies" is referenced as a luminous exploration of cosmology in relation to dance, weaving a matrix unifying a people's mythic metaphysics, that of the Yoruba, with the universally communicative poetry of the body represented by dance.

Demonstrating how movement itself can function as a mode of philosophical articulation, this approach foregrounds cognition as multisensory, performative, and collective—challenging text-bound and disembodied models of knowledge.

Everyday Aesthetics as Epistemology

The chapter on the philosophical implications of Yoruba women's hairstyles in his Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies is depicted as a magnificent exploration of how humanity, represented by the Yoruba context, makes existence meaningful by developing a range of values, from the abstract to the concrete, in relation to the biological and aesthetic  fundamentals of existence.

Through an analysis of hairstyles—situated at the intersection of biology, aesthetics, spirituality, and social value—the work demonstrates how abstract principles and concrete practices interpenetrate in the construction of social and thought worlds.

Realizing Human Potential

His essays "Professor Babafemi Badejo: An Icon of Icons" and " Professor Femi Badejo At 70: The Advocacy of Equity" go beyond eulogy to explore the question of how individual values and opportunity intersect to enable the actualization of human potential, an investigation correlative with his engagement with ideas of the unfolding of human possibility at the intersection of matter and spirit in his book Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality, issues resonant across his writings on various figures, such  reflections forming a coherent meditation on the unfolding of human capacity within both material and metaphysical dimensions of existence.

Fostering Multi- Cognitive Dialogue

"Ritual Archives" is projected as strategic for thinking through how to enable dialogue between the plurarity of cognitive processes and world views, generating synergies amplifying human cognitive capcities beyond epistemic silos.

Building Integrative Systems: Within and Beyond the Written Word

These creative productions are correlated with his work, all the more remarkable for operating outside institutional enablements, in developing a multi-continental research network, in relation to various book series with diverse publishers, complemented by an interview sequence employing the synergy of dialogue and visual media in collaboratively examining issues in terms of their live immediacies, at the intersection of the organic, the existential and the reflective.

Falola's body of work articulates a cognitive model that is pluralistic, performative, and dialogical. Here, knowledge may emerge through thought in dalogue with interpersonal engagement,  through movement, ritual, and symbolic synthesis.

Transdisciplinarity and the Local–Universal Axis

The professorship also requires its holder to guide seminars on transdiciplinary explorations of any subject of their choice, in relation to any regions of the world, demonstrating how the local illuminates the universal.

Falola’s preliminary seminar offerings—“Systems of Life Mapping: Between Divination, History and Self-Writing” and “Integrative Cognitive Processes: Between Inspiration, Spirit and Intellect”—signal a pedagogy oriented toward synthesis, reflexivity, and expansive exploration. 

The Professor of Cognitive Processes and Systems becomes an initiator rather than an instructor—guiding students into architectures of meaning capable of withstanding both technological power and existential uncertainty.

Conclusion: Toward a Renewed Educational Future

In an AI-driven world education must evolve.  Falola's scholarship and leadership offer a powerful blueprint — one that roots universal cognitive development in diverse cultural experiences while embracing technological enhancement.

 His work inspires a future where education fosters not just knowledgeable individuals, but thoughtful, reflective, and creatively empowered humans.

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros

Jaunary 11, 2027