•  229
    The Clarity of Understanding
    Dissertation, Queen's University. 2021.
    A platitude about understanding is that it involves grasping. But what is grasping? In this thesis, I develop a novel account of grasping that is rooted in phenomenal consciousness. According to this account, grasping is a matter of having a distinct kind of conscious experience: clear perception. Clear perception has a distinct cognitive phenomenology that characterizes it. Call this the clarity account of grasping. I go on to argue that the dominant view of grasping in the literature, the abil…Read more
  •  28
    Understanding Biology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
    with Elsa Lawerence, Srijit Seal, Chaitanya Joshi, Matthew Greening, Pietro Lio, Shantung Singh, Andreas Bender, and Pietro Sormanni
    Modern life sciences research is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to model biological systems, primarily centered around the use of machine learning (ML) models. Although ML is undeniably useful for identifying patterns in large, complex data sets, its widespread application in biological sciences represents a significant deviation from traditional methods of scientific inquiry. As such, the interplay between these models and scientific understanding in biology is …Read more