Research Portfolio

My research investigates the developing role technology plays in human culture, ethics, phenomenology, and psychology.  I am fascinated by the way Virtual and Mixed Reality technologies reshape our practical and ethical landscapes, all while revealing phenomenal features of experience and raising the possibility of artificial intelligences.  I aim to investigate two sets of questions over the next several years.  First, does virtual reality provide a useful model for understanding phenomenal conscious experience, and can that model then be applied to developing and understanding robust A.I.?  In other words, is it possible to create a machine where there is something that it would be like to be that machine (a “synthetic phenomenology”)?  Second, what is ethically and socially at stake in our urge to create artificial second realities?  As more of our lives shift into fully virtual spaces entirely dominated by human will and design, how does moving between the different “normative zones” these worlds affect our moral affordance structures? 

Past Work and Qualifications

I have participated in a history of well-developed, collaborative academic projects.  In addition to my PhD dissertation and Masters’ Thesis, I have worked as a research assistant on several major projects on topics ranging from phenomenology and virtual reality to the ethics of shame.  Additionally, I currently have a chapter forthcoming as part of a volume on the philosophy and physics of time for Vilnius University Press.  My dissertation focuses on the unique role art and aesthetic experience play in the manipulation and development human time-consciousness, and how artworks function as a kind of technology that can alter the temporal framework experience.  Building on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporality developed Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and on Alva Noë’s account of artworks as “strange tools” (Strange Tools, 2015) that allow human beings to catch themselves in the act of creating meaningful practical, ethical, and social structures, I argue that one of the primary functions of artworks is to help us manipulate and frame our sense of our embeddedness time.  By this I mean that artworks affect not only our sense of possibility and memory but to clarify the way that events and experiences relate to each other and influence our grasp of causality and meaning.  Such phenomena can most clearly be seen in the montage features of film where moments that would be temporally distant in the experience of a lived life are closely juxtaposed, demonstrating to the audience that those events and events of those types inform and characterize each other.  Over the course of the dissertation, I highlight several important features of art objects, such as temporal framing and virtual time-structures that allow for this manipulation of the lived sense of time.

My dissertation sets the stage for a phenomenological investigation into other forms of human activity that blur the line between art and technology.  The research I have developed in the philosophy of technology is oriented around the “postphenomenology” inaugurated by Don Ihde (Postphenomenology, 1993) and further developed by Peter-Paul Verbeek and Joseph Rosenberger, which aims to clarify the various modes of experiential mediation that technology enables.  I am especially interested in investigating how the development of artificial sensible realities through VR and MR technology reconfigures our relationships to the world and to each other, and, relatedly, how the virtualization process may be foundational to the development of other intelligences like our own (A.I)  Both my past and upcoming work are inherently interdisciplinary, pulling from  philosophy, computer science and technology studies, intellectual history, and the cognitive sciences. 

In 2020 I was the William S. Minor Dissertation Fellow for the Foundation of the Philosophy of Creativity, in coordination with the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.  During my fellowship, I worked closely with Randall Auxier and Myron Jackson to develop a chapter of my dissertation for presentation as part of the annual Hahn Lecture Series.  You can find the fellowship information and my lecture here.  I have also worked as the editorial and research assistant on five books from major academic presses, organized a session and presented at the Eastern APA, organized an international conference, and presented my work at over a dozen national and international philosophy conferences. 

Research Proposal:  Synthetic Phenomenologies and Time

Virtual and mixed reality technologies will soon dominate many forms of entertainment, labor, and discourse.  VR’s capacity to “immerse” its users in a rich simulated reality (Riva, 2014, “Being Present in a Virtual World”), and MR’s capacity to directly insert digital “objects” into everyday experience (Lindley, 2013 “Trans-reality Gaming”) signal dramatic shifts in how we engage with technology.  VR technology no longer presents itself as an external entity in a natural world space but as the foundational structure of new and fully manipulatable artificial worlds.  Analyzing the way that entering digital worlds alters the phenomenal and ethical affordance landscape available to users is a pressing philosophical concern which presents a series of questions that can only be approached by sharing resources between philosophers and computer scientists.  Concurrent with submitting my dissertation manuscript for publication, I plan to publish articles on two questions.

First, following on Thomas Metzinger’s suggestion in his 2018 “Why is Virtual Reality Interesting to Philosophers” (Frontiers in Robotics and AI), I aim to first analyze the extent to which virtualization will be fundamental for the creation of robust human-like AI, and then engage with how different options available to programmers in the creation of virtual environments effect the conditions of both human users and artificial intelligences.  Borrowing from Descartes, Metzinger argues that since all systems that organize input into a coherent set of features constituting “worlds” are generally distinct from those inputs, there is a sense in which all reality is virtual. In the human case, various events and entities stimulate biological organs that then transmit information to the brain, which organizes that information into a systematic presentation of those stimuli that is meaningful for the human person.  The reality we inhabit is part a virtual presentation of those stimuli and part a projection of a predictive model of objects and an environment that would generate said stimuli.  Metzinger refers to this as the “Virtual Reality Model of Consciousness” (VRM) which he takes to replace the computational model of consciousness.   While Metzinger’s VRM provides a helpful context for analyzing the connection between ordinary lived experience, virtual reality, and VR/AI systems, it faces several phenomenological challenges, the most central of which relates to phenomenology of time.  Metzinger points out that any meaningfully robust AI would need to simulate a reality for itself in much the same way that human brains generate realities for living persons.  To have a human-like consciousness, AI will have to possess a positional virtual experience and a sense of its phenomenal presence.  Critical to this virtual positionality in an environment is the question of how such a perspective could be situated in a virtualization of time.  In my dissertation I point out that a sense of situatedness within a temporal horizon is constitutive of any lived perspective and that this temporal horizon is extraordinarily flexible and responsive to the shifting structures of attention.  I intend to argue that the same will be true of any VR/AI system and that how we structure the temporal components of the system’s VR will largely determine the character of the system as a whole (Metzinger 2018).  Thus, one of my goals over the next two years is to use phenomenological resources derived from my study of Merleau-Ponty to clarify the temporal component of VR/AI “synthetic phenomenologies” and to investigate whether AI simulating a temporal horizon for itself would make it possible for a computer to have “an experience,” a question with obvious ethical ramifications.

Second, I am interested in what is morally and socially at stake in human the urge to create and deploy robust artificial realities and intelligences.  As the affordances programmers create for “users” (human or AI) in VR have a direct impact on the prudential and moral calculations those users make, I will explore how creating VR environments reflects and alters existing ethical intuitions while also examining the moral repercussions of inhabiting synthetic realities. Here I draw on Michael Sandel (2007, 2020) and others who critique what can be called the “dominance model” of human-technology relations.  On the one hand, many VR systems seem present paradigmatic cases of this model in that they reflect an urge to develop worlds that are fully under our control.  In this way, the urge to create VR bears striking resemblance to the human drive for control over its native environment and can be seen as an extreme manifestation of the “control ontology” that dominates contemporary Western culture (Heinzel, 2010 “The Phenomenology of VR”). 

However, VR tech also actively disrupts that same control ontology.  VR encourages users to develop a series of radically different and seemingly isolated “normative zones” of action and experience and programmers have a direct role in determining what actions, dispositions, and conceptual and temporal schemas are morally and practically efficacious for users as they cross between realities.  Yet, accounts suggest that transitioning between realities is incredibly jarring, and often puts pressure on users’ confidence in a baseline reality and can lead to an “existential hangover” that is indicative of a deeper moral dilemma (Searles, 2016).  I plan to argue that this disruption is related to how virtual realities problematize on our baseline sense of time and create the illusion that we can directly control our temporal structures.  In our native reality, time is quintessentially that which is beyond us—moments go by whether we want them to or not.  Yet, in virtual worlds, even time seems under our direct control.  Users can save, load, and replay moments, and programmers can play with the temporal relationships between events, in radical cases, disrupt a user’s sense of the continuity of time (The Outer Wilds, 2019).  But when we transition between worlds, we are confronted with our vulnerability to the unbiddeness of time.  To clarify disruption and draw out its consequences, I will develop Alfred Schutz’s discussion of the “domains of reality” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1945) and recent work by Dong-Hee Shin on the role of Gibsonian affordances in VR (Telematics and Infomatics, 2017).

Writing Samples

Here you will find several writing samples on a variety of subjects ranging from phenomenology and perception to the philosophy of time to contemporary ethics and compatibility problems