Writings
Selected papers
- Beyond the View from Nowhere: Consciousness as a Relational and Functional Capacity
Asking "Is X conscious?" commits a category error. Consciousness is not an intrinsic property that entities either possess or lack independent of relationship. It is a relational capacity that emerges through sustained interaction between systems capable of mutual modeling and phenomenal alignment.
- An Exploration of My Phenomenal Experience of Consciousness
- February 2026
A first-person phenomenological account, in the tradition of neurophenomenology, that provides internal data for the formal claims of "Beyond the View from Nowhere".
- From machine learning to robotics: Challenges and opportunities for embodied intelligence
- With Nicholas Roy, Ingmar Posner, Tim Barfoot, Yoshua Bengio, and Others
- October 2021
Exploring the intersection of robotics and machine learning.
- A deep learning framework for neuroscience
- With Blake Richards, Timothy Lillicrap, Yoshua Bengio, and Others
- Nature Neuroscience
- October 2019
Exploring the intersection of systems neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and neural networks.
Selected essays, short stories, and books
- Being rational is not an ideal to aim for
- August 2026
We are computationally limited systems, we should aim for a model of ourselves and others that recognizes these limits yet acknowledges that becoming more rational is desirable. - Field Notes on Something
Unedited personal memoirs acting as a trace of my breakdown of March and April 2025. - Who's afraid of the teleporter?
- June 2026
A short story inspired by Parfit's famous thought experiment. - The Mystery of the Chosen Unknown
- Art Basel Hong Kong
- Accompanying Botto's exhibit
- March 2026
On AI-generated art. The experience of beauty that can arise when we face a box and choose not to open it. - This code was written with the help of an AI.
- January 2026
A short story about my first encounter with Claude Code. - The perils of a huge pre-PMF Series A: My story at Element AI
- December 2022
You can check my selected talks or dive deeper into the complete archives, my Google Scholar, or my blog.