About

I work on the philosophy of mind — in particular on what it would take for a physical system to count as computing something, and on what follows for theories of consciousness that lean on that notion.

The question I keep returning to is the one in the title of an old seminar paper: what makes a physical system computational? It looks like a technical question and turns out to be a question about how much interpretation we are willing to let into a scientific description of the world.

If the answer is “quite a lot”, then computationalism about the mind is close to empty, because every physical system implements every computation under some mapping. If the answer is “almost none”, we owe an account of which physical facts make the mapping the right one. Most of my work lives between those two failures.

What is where

Finished and near-finished work sits under Research. Notes is where an argument gets tried out before it deserves a paper — the rough version, kept public on purpose. Essays are written for readers outside the seminar room. Translations exist because several of these texts still have no decent Greek edition.

Elsewhere

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