Cassandra Williams

Research

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

How Speculative is Biopsychism Really?

I argue that the evidence of motivational trade-offs in C. elegans lends support to biopsychism, the thesis that all life is sentient. I argue that while C. elegans's behaviour is not cognitive (i.e., involving manipulation of representations), it is also not merely a reflex response. Instead, it should be understood as an attentional phenomenon. This requires that we adopt a framework for understanding sentience which countenances the possibility of bona fide psychology in between reflex and cognition. I propose the ecological account of agency as the framework fit for this task, and suggest the upshot that maybe sentience is part and parcel of life itself.

Presentations

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.

Presenting at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 2024.

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