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My research investigates the mind at it's lower boundaries. Philosophical and scientific study of the mind often overemphasizes humans to a degree that unduly constrains how we think about our own minds as well as the minds of non-human animals. I focus on distant organisms, such as worms and bacteria—especially exploring the relationship between life, agency, and sentience—to better understand these simpler creatures and also to better understand ourselves.
Papers in Progress
BiosentientismSentience, the capacity for valenced mental states, has traditionally been thought to be restricted to sophisticated animals; but many philosophers and scientists have increasingly encouraged that a much broader range of animals be countenanced as sentient. In this paper I argue for biosentientism: the thesis that all organisms are sentient. Consideration of the neural mechanism underlying the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans’s (C. elegans) motivational trade-off decisions reveals that C. elegans exemplifies flexible behavioural control via top-down attention, a mechanism which I argue lies in between reflex and cognition. I develop a framework which allows us to make sense of this kind of flexible behaviour in the absence of cognition by understanding organisms as primitive agents responding to the affordances of their environments. I then deploy this framework to argue that C. elegans is sentient, and, further, to argue for biosentientism.Primordial ValenceValenced experiences are central features of our mental lives, with explanatory roles in ethics, moral psychology, and as a “common currency” for decision-making. Although the orthodox approach to the study of valence has mainly attended to sophisticated animals, recent considerations of animal welfare and the comparative psychology of decision-making have inspired philosophers and scientists to attend to the possibility of valenced experiences in distant creatures like invertebrates, insects, and perhaps even beyond. But even the most liberal theories of valence would rule out valence in any creature that lacks a brain of sufficient similarity to humans or which lacks the kind of mental representations possessed by sophisticated animals. Here I defend an enactive-ecological theory of primordial valence, according to which valence is understood vis-a-vis an organism’s affordances.
Presentations (* = refereed)
- Would I still be sentient if I was a worm?
Ontario Mind Group.
October 20, 2025 - How Speculative is Biopsychism Really? *
Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
June 20, 2025 - How Speculative is Biopsychism Really? *
Workshop on The Edge of Sentience, Ruhr University Bochum.
June 12, 2025 - Making Sense of Agency *
International Conference for Artificial Life.
July 24, 2024 - Making Sense of Agency *
Dimensions of Radical Embodiment, University of Murcia.
June 21, 2024 - Making Sense of Agency *
On Purpose, Duke University.
May 6, 2024 - Making Sense of Agency *
Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
March 23, 2024 - Radicalism Twice Over: Radical Structuralism, Radical Embodiment, and Subjectivity *
Berlin Workshop on Ecological Psychology, Technical University of Berlin.
June 9, 2023 - Feeling It Out: Affectivity as Minimal Rationality *
Emotions, Reasons, and Rational Agency, University of Tennessee.
March 18, 2023 - Taking Biology Seriously: An Enactive Solution to the Problem of Conscious Experience
University of Toronto Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, University of Toronto.
April 9, 2019
Navigating while wearing prism goggles. Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, 2022.
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