About Me
I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colby College and affiliated faculty at the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. My research explores how we understand and model cognitive capacities, and how we understand and interact with artificial intelligence. One strand of my work focuses on internal representations that structure the behavior of biological and artificial systems. Another focuses on how embodiment and expressive movement shape cognition. I have a special interest in studying the mind in dance, and have developed a novel approach to the computational analysis of human movement. I regularly collaborate across disciplines, contributing philosophical perspectives to projects working to simulate neural systems and apply new machine learning methods. At Colby, I teach courses in philosophy of mind, AI, cognitive science, and dance. Before joining the Colby faculty, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship in computational neuroscience at UPenn, where I also received my PhD in Philosophy, and I hold a JD from Yale Law School.
Research
Selected Publications
Rethinking Artificial General Intelligence: Beyond Anthropomorphism (Invited chapter for Introducing Philosophy of Mind, Today, Routledge),
-- 2026 (forthcoming)
Understanding Complexity Through Affordances (with Sonia Roberts),
-- 2025 Minds and Machines
Computational kinematics of dance: distinguishing Hip Hop genres (with Tony Liu, Jordan Matelsky, Felipe Parodi, Brett Mensh, John Krakauer and Konrad Kording),
-- 2024 Frontiers in Human Robotics and AI
Commentary on Favela and Machery, "Investigating the concept of representation in neural and psychological sciences
-- 2023 The Brains Blog
Three Aspects of Representation in Neuroscience (with Ben Lansdell and Konrad Kording),
-- 2022 Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Creativity in AI Dance Art
-- 2022 International Conference on Computational Creativity
Natural information, factivity and nomicity
-- 2021 Biology and Philosophy
Referee Report of (hypothetical) Philosophy-101 Textbook, by Professor Unspecified
-- 2021 Teaching Philosophy
Spanish Translation by Fredy H.P. Galindo
-- 2023 Cuestiones Filosophia
Teaching
I strive to empower my students to let their curiosity and passion drive their education. My courses challenge students to consider a topic from multiple disciplinary and cultural perspectives, and I incorporate hands-on interaction with emerging technologies, helping to build broadly applicable skills and knowledge.
Courses Taught
AI and Human Values
Central Philosophical Issues: Mind, Body and Machine
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Dance
Philosophy of Emotion
Philosophy of Visual Perception
Bodes and Power
Ethics
CV
You can view my CV below or download the PDF here.
For inquiries about consulting, see this page.
About Now
It's spring semester at Colby and I'm teaching three courses: "Mind, Body & Machine," which traces a path from Descartes and Ibn Sina through Turing and neural networks to algorithmic bias; "Philosophy of Dance," combining guided movement practice with readings in phenomenology, ontology, and the politics of the body; and "Philosophy of Science," covering the arc from Hume and Popper through mechanisms and modeling to situated knowledge and scientific values.
New paper with Sonia Roberts on comparing complexity across biological and artificial agents published in Minds & Machines.
Also looking forward to seeing my chapter "Rethinking AGI: Beyond Anthropomorphism" come out soon in a Routledge coursebook, Introducing Philosophy of Mind, Today.
Continuing to develop computational approaches to analyzing dance and other complex human movement. I've got a high-fidelity markerless motion-capture setup running in the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, building on and extending the work from this earlier study with new data collection and analysis methods.