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I'm a research fellow and director of the Centre for Computing in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
I'm a computer scientist refurbished into a philosopher. I did a BSc in computer science at Université Laval. Halfway through, I became very puzzled by the mind-body problem and decided to focus on cognitive science instead. I spent a year at the University of Waterloo trying to study as much cogsci as I could as part of my CS degree, but ultimately I decided I had to do a PhD in philosophy. I lucked out and the University of Toronto took me in spite of my limited formal training in philosophy. After completing my coursework and comprehensives I decided to transfer to the Australian National University to study under the supervision of David Chalmers, Daniel Stoljar and Frank Jackson.
I was born in beautiful Quebec City.
- What is the relation between consciousness and the physical (identity, supervenience, causation, etc)?Philosophers tend to focus on the first question, while cognitive scientists tend to focus on the second. I believe philosophers have much to contribute to research on the second question. In particular, we do not at this stage have a suitably regimented language in which to formulate hypotheses regarding general relations between consciousness and the physical. My research aims to develop a conceptual and formal framework that can help address this regimentation problem. I began tackling this problem in my dissertation by defending a variant on the representational theory of consciousness, which I argue can help us regiment the language we use for describing states of consciousness. I call the kind of representationalism I defend virtualism. See the introduction to my dissertation for an overview. My current work addresses a number of questions left open in my dissertation and improves on the regimentation provided by virtualism.
- Which conscious states are correlated with which physical states?
