Description / Biography

Recent/Upcoming talks (where you can find me):

Talk: “Machines of Action-Undergoing: Deweyan Habits for Enactive AI” at John Dewey’s Experience and Nature: A Centennial Celebration. (The Center for Dewey Studies, University of Illinois at Carbondale, October 16-19, 2025) 

Talk: “Presence-As-Absence and Intercorporeality: Being-At-A-Distance” at SocialBRIDGES: PRESENCE. (TU Dresden, September 22-23, 2025) 

Talk: “Emotion-As-Value: Enactive Challenges for Machine Consciousness” at the 31^st Annual Science of Consciousness Conference. (Barcelona, Spain, July 6-13, 2025)

Talk: “Hell is Other Robots: Participatory Sense-Making and GenAI” at the Annual Conference of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy held with the Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (IACAP/AISB). (University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, July 1-3, 2025) 

Symposium: “Intimate technologies, brain chips and cyborgs: revisting the bright-line argument” with Aaron Butler, David Gunkle, and John Sullins at the 24^th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology: The Intimate Technological Revolution. (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, June 25-28, 2025) 

About me:

I run the Cognitive Science program here at Beloit, which includes teaching some of my favorite classes, like Cyborg Brains and Hybrid Minds and Artificial Intelligence in Fact and Fiction (COGS 205). I also teach for the Philosophy and Psychology departments, including classes like Minds, Brains, and Bodies (PHIL/COGS 241) and Memory and Cognition (PSYC/COGS 240).

Lately I’ve been teaching my Intro to Philosophy using the short fiction of Ted Chiang, and before that I taught The Good Place and Philosophy several times. I see every class as a journey - the syllabus is a roadmap but it’s the students who create the story.

My research focuses on 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive), mostly in relation to artificial intelligence and cyborg technologies. This ranges from the implications of conceptual metaphor and gesture on the possibilities of machine minds, through questions about extended human cognition through presence technologies or physical and social prosthetics.

Some recent publications:

“How Not to Collaborate with Large Language Models: The Current Impossibility of Social Cognition with AI Systems.” (2025)

“Shared Ontologies: 4e Cognition and Montemayor’s Humanitarian AI” (2024) 

“How much like us do we want AIs to be? Considering both intelligence and psychology when thinking about “human-like” AI” with Dietrich, E., Sullins, J., Fields, C., Van Heuveln, B., (2024) 

“I’m Afraid HAL Can’t Do That: Your Smart Home is Not That Kind of Existential Threat” (2025)

“Dual Aspect Presence: Intercorporeality for Thee But Not for Me” (2022) 

Carving Up Participation: Sense-Making and Sociomorphing for Artificial Minds (2022) (with Beloit 2020 graduate Eli McGraw)

Mutual Incorporation, Intercorporeality, and the Problem of Mediating Systems (2022)

Artificial Instinct: Lem’s Robots as a Model Case for AI (2021)

Our co-authored book, “Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) was named a winner of 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles Award from the American Library Association, and will have an updated edition coming in 2026.

Some recent press/public outreach:

“We’re Using AI for Stupid and Unnecessary Reasons: What if we just stopped?” (The Detroit Free Press, January 13, 2025)

AI is a False God (The Walrus, May 24, 2024)

 You, Me, Spot, and Zoom: Puzzles in Presence and Intercorporeality (ENSO Seminar, November 2, 2023)

Embracing the Mad Science of Machine Consciousness (post on the APA blog of Current Issues in Public Philosophy, January 2024)

Report on the conference “The Science of Consciousness” in Taormina, Sicily (article in German, August 2023)

September 25, 2023 appearance on WPR’s Central Time to discuss author lawsuit against OpenAI

September 21, 2023 moderating a book launch at A Room of One’s Own in Madison, WI, celebrating Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew

January 24, 2023 appearance on WORT radio’s A Public Affair to discuss the possibility of ethical AI