My main research encompasses:

• the human mind
• digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Whereas both sides are often either compared or contrasted, I find that understanding the possibilities of computational manipulation of meaning and experience requires a fundamental reconsideration of classical concepts concerning the mind and the world. For instance, my prize-winning essay “The Computation of Bodily, Embodied, and Virtual Reality” investigates the significance of embodiment in the digital age. Another prize-winning essay investigates how digitization transforms human orientation. In another paper, the philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs and I investigate the relationship between AI, human language use, and experience with respect to the question of how LLMs make use of the patterns of human language use.

The Human Mind

I regard self and subjectivity as core features of the mind, for instance in my paper “The Embodied Self and the Paradox of Subjectivity.” Yet, I also consider the human mind is embedded in intersubjective meaning and culture, for instance in my co-edited book Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture  (MIT Press). Vice versa, Subjective experience is fundamental for intersubjective meaning. Communication is usually much more than a calculus and rather proceeds, in Wittgenstein’s later expression, in language-games that often involve creative rule-following. This reveals a fundamental challenge digital processing of meaning is confronted with.

AI and Digitalization

Even very new technologies build on old conceptual developments. I investigate the dynamic development of thought and language over the centuries not out of mere historical interest but because I see the impact of that development in today’s concepts and ways of thinking. For instance, in my dissertation I analyzed the main steps of the mathematization (or digitization) of the world over the last four centuries, which stands behind the four main metaphysical accounts of colors today. In my research, I draw on quite different traditions, such as phenomenology, philosophy of mind and language, and metaphysics.