Current research project:
Idealization in cognitive science and specifically computational neuroscience. On this topic I have published "The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science" (2025) with the MIT Press, building on work published in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. The central message of this project is: scientific models of the mind and brain are idealized models. We study nature, including the mind, by partially or entirely idealizing it. An idealized model is a description of a hypothetical system—something that does not actually exist in nature. I show that idealization in cognitive science ca…
Current research project:
Idealization in cognitive science and specifically computational neuroscience. On this topic I have published "The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science" (2025) with the MIT Press, building on work published in the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. The central message of this project is: scientific models of the mind and brain are idealized models. We study nature, including the mind, by partially or entirely idealizing it. An idealized model is a description of a hypothetical system—something that does not actually exist in nature. I show that idealization in cognitive science can work in the service of scientific realism, although realism about the computational theory of cognition and the representational theory of mind cannot be defended. I have a completed a follow-up book "The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science and Computational Neuroscience" forthcoming with the MIT Press examining and role and limitations of idealization in neural coding methods and deep learning models.
Previous (and partly ongoing) research projects:
Some of my research has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation, more specially a John Templeton Foundation Academic Cross-Training fellowship, carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in Karl Friston's research group at University College London. This provided me with the best possible opportunity to learn the formalisms used in computational neuroscience, working with some of the best in the world. My PhD was on the metaphysics of the extended mind, driving a temporal (or diachronic) view on constitution. I have published extensively on topics in the 4E field in philosophy of cognitive science.
Publications:
I have published work in some of the best venues in philosophy: the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Biology & Philosophy, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Mind & Language, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese, and so forth. With Julian Kiverstein, I have co-authored "Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-Wave View" published with Routledge (2019).
Supervisors:
Richard Menary (principle PhD supervisor, MQ), John Sutton (PhD co-supervisor, MQ), Karl Friston (John Templeton Foundation Academic Cross-Training Fellowship mentor at UCL), and Dan Hutto (Head of the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong)
