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Overview
My research spans a broad range of philosophical areas. It reaches from the philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science and the biosciences, and action theory to ethics and epistemology, and – most recently the philosophy of social and political science. A special focus of my research is the capacity of attention. I investigate questions like these: what is attention? How does it shape the mind and society? What deserves the attention of an individual, and how should we together coordinate our attention? My research is about central philosophical topics about the nature of the mind, perception, consciousness, freedom and action, individual and society, rationality and ethics. My approach involves philosophical reflection in close dialogue with other disciplines including biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics and other social sciences, and literary studies.
Topics
Attention
My work investigates the nature of attention, the relationship between attention and consciousness, and the role of attention for agency and in the architecture of the mind. I have developed a unified framework that deals with those questions. The framework treats attention as constituted by fundamental and irreducible structures of our minds, priority structures. These priority structures have occurrent, subject-level mental states as their parts and order them by their relative priority to the subject. Their function is to organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of what is currently in our minds. Attention is the activity of regulating those structures (attention capture is a change in the activity).
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Consciousness
What kind of thing is consciousness? What is its structure? I've argued for a metaphysics of consciousness that treats consciousness as an agent's activity. I argue that this view explains the unity of consciousness in a novel way, it shows how the self is involved in consciousness, explains how we are aware of our own conscious states, and allows us to keep attractive elements of an intentionalist view of consciousness while rejecting others.
I am supervising a postdoc (Andrew Lee) investigating the structure of consciousness, and continue to work on the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness, and other topics about the structure of consciousness.
See:
- 'Attention as Structuring of the Stream of Consciousness' (paywall)
- 'Beyond Appearances' (paywall)
- 'Phenomenal Structure' (paywall)
- 'Attentional Organization and the Unity of Consciousness'
- 'Can Representationism Explain how Attention affects Appearances'
- 'The Perspectivity Picture' (paywall)
- 'Consciousness and No Self?'
- 'Awareness of Attending' (paywall)
- 'Consciousness is something you do' (short summary)
Action
When are we active and when are we passive? What exactly is it to do something? How is that related to doing something intentionaIly? I have argued that a process notion of activity as prior to an event notion of action. Activities are processes with a certain internal structure - where the temporal evolution of some states and events guides the temporal evolution of others. I have argued that certain kinds of activity are guided directly by perceptual states, and that self-control can be explained without a divided mind or special motivational resources.
I am supervising PhD projects that looks further into the relationship between automaticity and control (Francesca Secco), and the relationship between ethics, agency, and artificial intelligence (Sigurd Hovd)
See
- 'Perceptual Guidance'
- 'Attending' (paywall!)
- 'Activities' (paywall!)
- 'Self-control is not special'
Perception
I have argued that the structure of perception is richer than sometimes assumed, along a number of dimensions: the structure of perception is not exhausted by the structure of perceptual content; there is no close match between the temporal structure of perceptual experience and its temporal content; and perceptual experience has not only informational content but also action guiding content. If perception is so rich, how then is it different from cognition? That was the subject of the grant 'Thought and Sense'.
The structure of perceptual experience and its consequences for the nature of perceptual experience is also analyzed in detail by my PhD student Max Kippersund (See also the work by my 'Thought and Sense' collaborators Anders Nes and Kristoffer Sundberg)
See:
- 'Beyond Appearances' (paywall)
- 'Phenomenal Structure' (paywall)
- 'Is Attention a Non-propositional Attitude?'
- 'Silencing the Experience of Change'
- 'Perceptual Guidance'
- 'The Perception/Cognition Distinction'
Epistemology, Ethics, and Political Philosophy
What is good attention? Much public discussion about social media, public health, and political debates is focused on versions of this question. What deserves our attention and how we should regulate attention in the face of distraction occupies the debate. My research engages in a philosophical investigation of attention norms and develops a framework for thinking about them. While entire fields of philosophy investigate the normative assessment of other aspects of the mind, the normative structure of attention remains largely unstudied. In several integrated and multidimensional research projects I investigate the political, ethical, prudential, and epistemic evaluation of attention. This takes my research into epistemology, ethics, decision theory, and political philosophy.
See:
- 'The Ethics of Attention'
- 'The Rationality of Salience' (draft)
- Project pages for GOODATTENTION and Salient Solutions
Other Topics
Intentionality and Propositionality
Is intentionality the mark of the mental? Or does the mind have non-intentional features? And are all intentional states propositional attitudes? I've argued against the the view that there is mental paint - phenomenal qualities that flout free from the intentional character of consciousness. And I also have expressed sympathy with the view that on a reasonable understanding of 'state', all mental states are intentional states. Yet, there is structure in the mind that is not exhausted by the attitude/intentional content (or object) structure. In one of my papers I argue that this shows that the mind is not a collection of propositional attitudes.
See:
- 'Beyond Appearances' (paywall)
- 'Phenomenal Structure' (paywall)
- 'Can Representationism Explain how Attention affects Appearances'
- 'Is Attention a Non-propositional Attitude?'
Culture and Biology
For several years, I was teaching a lecture in the philosophy of the social sciences. This resulted in a paper about culture and biology, and nature and nurture. I argue that what makes those dichotomies seem interesting is a deeply seated psychological tendency (psychological essentialism) to confuse 'genetic', 'natural' or 'biological' with being the result of intrinsic essences. But this way of thinking about humans and human kinds is, indeed, deeply confused. So, while those who argue for an important role of 'biology' in the explanation of human differences often see 'the science' on their side, they are mostly mistaken: defenders of 'biology' in public debates mostly have the biological sciences against them. What is often called 'biology' is a myth created by an intuitive tendency that grotesquely distorts real biological research.
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