About

When I was in high school, I was enrolled in an International Baccalaureate program, which required me to write a senior paper in a subject of my choice. I had little idea what philosophy was, but it sounded intriguing, so I chose it on a whim. As I started to learn more, I was struck that topics like consciousness, morality, rationality, and reality could be the subjects of academic study. I was also drawn to the abstract, theoretical character of analytic philosophy.

I stumbled upon an essay on philosophical zombies and found myself wondering why we aren’t all zombies. The more I thought about the mind–body problem, the more puzzled I became. Consciousness struck me as one of the deepest, hardest, and most significant topics we can study.

I went to Brown University. I arrived wanting to study consciousness, and Brown turned out to be an incredible place to explore that interest. I was fortunate to work with Jaegwon Kim, whose philosophical style had a lasting influence on my own approach to philosophy. I stayed for five years and graduated with three degrees: a BA in Philosophy, a BS in Cognitive Science, and an MA in Philosophy.

I went to New York University, which felt to me like the center of the philosophical world. David Chalmers, in particular, had long been one of my central philosophical influences, and both his ideas and his style are still recognizably present in my own work. I was also fortunate to have been part of an unusually strong graduate cohort. New York City itself is one of my favorite cities I’ve ever lived in: endlessly explorable, and saturated with texture and character. I miss the city each time I visit again.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter. I read it in high school, around the time I first discovered philosophy. The book is partly about consciousness, but it also draws connections across mathematics, music, art, poetry, artificial intelligence, biology, and philosophy. I liked its intellectual playfulness, its combination of creativity and abstraction, and its interplay between form and content. That intellectual temperament recurs in various ways in my own work. Coincidentally, Douglas Hofstadter was the PhD advisor of David Chalmers, who was later my own PhD advisor.

Pleasure.

See My Philosophical Views. You can also see my responses to the PhilPapers Survey.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about abstraction, dimensionality, locations, parts, naturalness, and metasemantics. These are all topics that I’m interested in from a purely metaphysical perspective, as well as in their applications to consciousness.

If you’re an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, then you could pitch an independent study topic. If you have strong visual design skills, then I’m open to working with students who want to help me with slides and other media.

If you’re applying to graduate school, then you should apply to the University of Toronto’s graduate program in philosophy. Students admitted to the program can then choose which faculty members they wish to work with.