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Feminism and enhancementIn Mary L. Edwards & S. Orestis Palermos (eds.), Feminist philosophy and emerging technologies, Routledge. 2023.
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23Review of Jeff Sebo: Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes (review)Ethics 134 (3): 443-447. 2024.
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48Better to be a Pig Dissatisfied than a Plant SatisfiedJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 37 (4): 1-17. 2024.In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and a…Read more
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47Neural networks, AI, and the goals of modelingBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.
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18Evolutionary mismatch and anomalies in the memory systemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.In order to understand involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu experiences, we argue that it is important to take an evolutionary medicine perspective. Here, we propose that these memory anomalies can be understood as the outcomes of an inevitable design trade-off between type I and type II errors in memory processing.
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16Model anarchismTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 38 (2): 225-245. 2023.This paper aims to articulate an anarchist challenge to a widespread assumption in the rapidly growing philosophical literature on models, modeling-practices, and model-based science. I argue that the various entities and practices called “models” and “modeling-practices” are too heterogeneous, too context-sensitive, and serve too many scientific purposes and roles, as to constitute unified scientific phenomena that would allow for useful epistemic and ontologies analyses. Just like Feyerabend o…Read more
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101Studying Introspection in Animals and AIsJournal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9): 63-74. 2023.The study of introspection has, up until now, been predominantly human-centric, with regrettably little attention devoted to the question of whether introspection might exist in non-humans, such as animals and artificial intelligence (AI), and what distinct forms it might take. In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to address this oversight by offering a non-anthropocentric framework for understanding introspection that could be used to address these questions. However,…Read more
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7Puritanical morality and the scaffolded evolution of self-controlBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.There is a puzzle in reconciling the widespread presence of puritanical norms condemning harmless pleasures with the theory that morality evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation. Here, we draw on the work of several philosophers to support the argument by Fitouchi et al. that these norms evolved to facilitate and scaffold self-control for the sake of cooperation.
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10The design space of human communication and the nonevolution of ideographyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the nonevolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in the design space.
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13Polygenic scores and social scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.It is a hotly contested issue whether polygenic scores should play a major role in the social sciences. Here, we defend a methodologically pluralist stance in which sociogenomics should abandon its hype and recognize that it suffers from all the methodological difficulties of the social sciences, yet nevertheless maintain an optimistic stance toward a more cautious use.
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30Flesh Without Blood: The Public Health Benefits of Lab‐Grown MeatJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 21 (1): 167-175. 2024.Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is t…Read more
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54Studying Animal Feelings: Integrating Sentience Research and Welfare ScienceJournal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7): 196-222. 2023.The goal of this article is to bring together two fields of research — animal sentience research and animal welfare science — with the aim of advancing our understanding of animal emotions, especially their subjectively experienced or 'felt' component (feelings). While these two research areas share a common interest in animal feelings, they have had surprisingly little interaction. In this paper, we make a call for the integration of these fields and outline some of the ways in which work done …Read more
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354Health, Agency, and the Evolution of ConsciousnessDissertation, The University of Sydney. 2022.This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experien…Read more
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795A Philosophy for the Science of Animal ConsciousnessRoutledge. 2023.This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s…Read more
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18Social robots and the intentional stanceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Why is it that people simultaneously treat social robots as mere designed artefacts, yet show willingness to interact with them as if they were real agents? Here, we argue that Dennett's distinction between the intentional stance and the design stance can help us to resolve this puzzle, allowing us to further our understanding of social robots as interactive depictions.
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15Evolutionary Game Theory and Interdisciplinary IntegrationCroatian Journal of Philosophy 23 (67): 33-50. 2023.Interdisciplinary research is becoming more and more popular. Many funding bodies encourage interdisciplinarity, as a criterion that promises scientific progress. Traditionally this has been linked to the idea of integrating or unifying disciplines. Using evolutionary game theory as a case study, Till Grüne-Yanoff (2016) argued that there is no such necessary link between interdisciplinary success and integration. Contrary to this, this paper argues that evolutionary game theory is a genuine cas…Read more
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38Hominin life history, pathological complexity, and the evolution of anxietyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.In order to address why the number of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are seemingly exploding in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, it is sensible to look at the evolution of human fearfulness responses. Here, we draw on Veit's pathological complexity framework to advance Grossmann's goal of re-characterizing human fearfulness as an adaptive trait.
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40Defending SentientismAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 168-170. 2023.The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the possibility of suffering in nonhumans, including animals only very distantly related to us, as well as artificial intelligence systems. Much...
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16Regulating Possibly Sentient Human Cerebral OrganoidsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 197-199. 2023.Due to their contested ethical and legal status, human cerebral organoids (HCOs) have become the subject of one of the most rapidly expanding debates in the recent bioethics literature. There is no...
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25Optimism about Measuring Animal FeelingsAsian Bioethics Review 15 (3): 351-355. 2023.While animal sentience research has flourished in the last decade, scepticism about our ability to accurately measure animal feelings has unfortunately remained fairly common. Here, we argue that evolutionary considerations about the functions of feelings will give us more reason for optimism and outline a method for how this might be achieved.
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29Positive Wild Animal WelfareBiology and Philosophy 38 (2): 1-19. 2023.With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals in the wild as existing in a state dominated by suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may often ha…Read more
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16Defending the Pathological Complexity ThesisBiological Theory 18 (3): 200-209. 2023.In this article, I respond to commentaries by Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg and by David Spurrett on my target article “Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness,” in which I have offered the first extended articulation of my pathological complexity thesis as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins and function of consciousness. My reply is structured by the arguments raised rather than by author and will offer a more detailed explication of some aspects of the pathological complexity…Read more
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15The scaffolded evolution of human communicationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Heintz & Scott-Phillips provide a useful synthesis for constructing a bridge between work by both cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists studying the diversity of human communication. Here, we aim to strengthen their bridge from the side of evolutionary biology, to argue that we can best understand ostensive communication as a scaffold for more complex forms of intentional expressions.
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139Darwinian and Autopoietic Views of the OrganismConstructivist Foundations 18 (1). 2022.Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.
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204Can ‘eugenics’ be defended?Bioethics Review 39 (1). 2021.In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancemen…Read more
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201Why Socio-Political Beliefs Trump Individual Morality: An Evolutionary PerspectiveAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4): 290-292. 2022.
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236Integrating Evolution into the Study of Animal SentienceAnimal Sentience 32 (30): 1-4. 2022.Like many others, I see Crump et al. (2022) as a milestone for improving upon previous guidelines and for extending their framework to decapod crustaceans. Their proposal would benefit from a firm evolutionary foundation by adding the comparative measurement of life-history complexity as a ninth criterion for attributing sentience to nonhuman animals
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246Darwinian and Autopoietic Views of the OrganismConstructivist Foundations 18 (1). 2022.Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.
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202Confidence Levels or Degrees of Sentience?Asian Bioethics Review 15 (1): 93-97. 2022.I applaud recent improvements upon previous guidelines for the assessment of pain in non-human species and the application of their framework towards decapod crustaceans. Rather than constituting a mere intermediate solution between the scientific difficulty of settling questions of animal consciousness and the need for a framework for the purposes of animal welfare legislation, I will argue that the longer lists of criteria for animal sentience should make us realize that animal sentience is a …Read more
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176On the evolutionary origins of the bifocal stanceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.In this commentary we advance Jagiello et al.'s proposal by zooming in on the possible evolutionary origins of the “bifocal stance” that may have enabled a major transition in human cultural evolution, arguing that the evolution of the bifocal stance was driven by an explosion in cultural complexity arising from cooperative foraging, which led to a feedback loop between the ritual and instrumental stances.
Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland