I'm a PhD candidate in the NYU Department of Philosophy. I teach philosophy of AI at Barnard College, and I did my undergraduate studies at Carleton College.
I work on theoretical questions about computation and representation, both biological and artificial. Mostly, I study what gives representations their structure, and what this means for their role in computation.
Teaching
As instructor
- Logic, NYU, Spring 2027
- Language Models and Philosophy, Barnard College, Fall 2026
- Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Barnard College, Fall 2025
- Logic, NYU, Fall 2025
- Minds and Machines, NYU, Summer 2025
- Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science, NYU, Summer 2022
As teaching assistant
- Global Ethics, for Kwame Anthony Appiah, Spring 2023
- Philosophy of Language, for Matt Mandelkern, Fall 2022
- Philosophy of Mind, for Verónica Gómez Sánchez, Spring 2022
- Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science, for Michael Strevens, Fall 2021
Papers
My dissertation committee is Michael Strevens, Ned Block, and David Chalmers.
In progress
- “How to See Things”Develops a computational account of what it is to visually represent objects, drawing heavily on empirical work.
- [Paper under review]Criticizes recent accounts of the iconic/analog/symbolic. Proposes a fix.
- “A Theory of Computational Structure”Gives a theory of the space of structures of computational vehicles and their implementation conditions. Uses case studies from neural networks and brains.
Technically, I have an Erdős number of 4 (Erdős – M. Kac – T. Jacobson – B. Allen – me), if you count these papers with nearly a thousand authors each. Maybe a better metric would be to weight each link by the log of the number of authors on the paper. Alas, on that definition my number goes up to 15.