About

I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on perceptual consciousness and the epistemology of value judgments and norm learning. My work has been published in Mind & Language, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Quarterly, Inquiry, and Hastings Center Report.

Primary research

My primary research stream develops the idea that perceptual consciousness has a syntactic or grammatical structure akin to the compositional rules for languages, maps, and diagrams. My research concerns the relationships between the character of conscious experience (what it's like to have it) the representational contents of conscious experience (what it represents) and the computational underpinnings of perceptual consciousness. Among other things, I defend a novel position called phenomenal schematics: even though consciousness is narrow and content is wide, the syntactic structure of perceptual consciousness constrains the possible contents our experiences can have.

Secondary research

My secondary research stream focuses on issues applied ethics, including biomedical ethics and the philosophy of disability. My current work in this area concerns the dual roles of biases and statistical inference in norm learning and value judgments.

Academic history

I am currently a member of the SENSOR project on sensory engineering with Fiona Macpherson, Derek Brown, Jack Lyons, and Sascha Fink. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for the Theory and Ethics of AI at Friedrich-Alexander University and a visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Glasgow University. From 2022-2024 I was a Vision: Science to Applications Postdoctoral Researcher at York University where I worked with Jacob Beck and Kevin Lande on the structure of visual consciousness. I also participated in Niko Troje's vision lab at York. From 2020-2022 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow with The Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition research project at the Universities of Antwerp and Salzburg working with Bence Nanay and Christopher Gauker. I obtained my PhD in 2020 from the University of Arizona working under Shaun Nichols, Terry Horgan, Martin Davies, and Jonathan Weinberg. I obtained my BPhil from Oxford and graduated as Valedictorian with a BA from Santa Clara University.