professional

I am a (full) professor of philosophy at Niagara University. Though not officially ranked, we consider ourselves to be within the top five most funny philosophy departments.

My research centers on a strongly naturalistic approach to good thinking. How can physical creatures—biological or artificial—think better? This involves fundamental issues in normative epistemology (what is it to think better?) and philosophy of mind (what is it for a physical system to think in the first place?). More specifically, my recent work has centered on two main issues:

• The ethics of artificial intelligence, especially the problem of aligning any future superintelligence. This involves some familiarity with the technical issues in machine learning, as well as with a range of philosophical problems like normative ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, and mental content. Here is a 20-minute presentation of my relatively optimistic take from many years ago; I have grown significantly more pessimistic since then.
  • I am grateful for funding support of this work from (in chronological order) the Survival and Flourishing Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, the Future of Life Institute, Nonlinear, the Center for AI Safety, and Ramana Kumar.
• A formal theory of patterns based in algorithmic information theory, in the style of Daniel Dennett’s “Real Patterns”. The central targets are formalizing explanation, inference to the best explanation, and Ockham’s razor. This involves formal epistemology and the philosophy of science.

Related work includes some metaphysics, conceptual analysis, and the nature of naturalistic philosophy.

• My most recent curriculum vitae (note that “most recent” does not strictly imply “recent”).
• For pre-prints and drafts of my papers, look first at my PhilPapers page, or contact me.
• I used to compose only in LaTeX, but have found pandoc and markdown to be an even better combination for analytic philosophy—more readable markup, more flexible in formats, and all the power of LaTeX when you need it.