Projects.

Collaborators: David Harris (McMaster University), Chris Burr (Alan Turing Institute), Andy Clark (University of Sussex), Felix Schoeller (Impossible Technology), Roy Solomon (Tel Aviv), Casper Hesp (University of Amsterdam), Karl Friston (UCL), Anastasia Brovkin (Mind & Brain), Bruno Lara (UAEM), Alejandra Ciria (UAEM), Anna Ciauncia (Lisbon), Daphne Demekes (ICL) and many more.

Virtuous artificial intelligence.

This project aims to integrate cognitive neuroscience, human health, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind and the arts to better understand how artificial intelligence (AI) may contribute to human flourishing. Our central premise is that AI technology may contribute positively to human agency, and we focus on understanding variation in individual and cultural approaches to living and thriving with AI.

This projects begin from recent developments in computational neuroscience that are being applied today to design and develop adaptive and successful AI’s and robots. As such, these new frameworks offer researchers a powerful bridge between neuroscience and technology research, and provide a solid basis for the type of interdisciplinary thinking needed to understand the complex integration of human and artificial intelligence. Central to this research project are questions such as: how can human happiness and wellbeing be supported and enhanced by human-AI interactions; how can we better design AI with human happiness and flourishing in mind; and the controversial, but useful, question of what flourishing might look like for artificial selves and cyborg agents.

I am currently leading a new research group with Felix Schoeller (MIT) dedicated to exploring the nature and impact of new emotion augmentation technology.

Collaborators: Andy Clark (University of Sussex), John Clippinger (MIT), Hugo Critchley (Sussex), Manos Tsikiris (London), Kathryn Laskey (C-RASC), Erik Rietveld (AMC), Julian Kiverstein (AMC), Maxwell Ramstead (McGill), Wanja Wiese (JGU), Sarah Garfinkel (UCL), Ines Hipolito (Mind & Brain), Abby Tabor (Bath) and many more.

A new science of well-being.

The picture of the human mind as an embodied prediction engine is now the dominant systems-level model in cognitive neuroscience. Grounded in these new (formally specifiable and empirically testable) cognitive scientific understandings, this project will begin to address some of the questions concerning human nature, character virtue, and routes to human flourishing. What mental attitudes and embodied skills are most conducive to human flourishing, why are these effective, and what practical implications does this have for the many ways we structure our own worlds and practices? By addressing these themes under the overarching umbrella of predictive processing we aim to reveal the shape of a new science of human wellbeing, and to explore how patterned practices, the human-built environment and the wider socio-technological niche can most positively (or negatively) impact our physical and mental health.

I am currently leading a new research group dedicated to developing new computationally tractable models of resilience and anti-fragility that are scalable across a wide range of complex systems (including businesses, communities and cities).

​Collaborators: Maxwell Ramstead (McGill University), Lars Sandved-Smith (UCL), Bassam Khoury (McGill University), Soham Rej (McGill University), Guillaume Dumas (Institut Pasteur), Michael Lifshitz (Stanford University), Antoine Lutz (INSERM)), George Deane (Edinburgh), Sam Wilkinson (Exeter), Jonas Mago (McGill), and many more.

Computational contemplative neuroscience

The aim of this project is to Investigate the potential of meditation practice to increase our capacities for the control of attention, emotional flourishing, prosociality, empathy, altruism, and compassion. To do so we are leveraging a combination of novel neuroimaging and computational modelling techniques, which are making it possible for the first time, to construct maps of the causal processes in the brain that underwrite the control of attention in meditation. Using these techniques we are creating empirically constrained models of the mechanisms and contexts that facilitate or hinder meditation. In this way we are aiming to help foster a new science of meditation - a computational contemplative neuroscience. As part of this project, I am in the process of using these models to design empirically informed meditation courses.