Ben Gaskin

I am essentially interested in the relationship between mind and world in all its aspects, from evolution to engineering: how is it that matter properly arranged has given birth to all this?

PhD student at the University of Sydney, supervised by Peter Godfrey-Smith

My research sits at the intersection of philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and artificial life. I work on agency, the origins of cognition, and what it takes for a physical system to become a genuine agent — drawing on thermodynamics, biosemiotics, and developmental robotics.

Key topics include intrinsic neural activity, symbol grounding, organisational closure, the epistemic cut, and machine consciousness. I also translate historical scientific texts from Russian and French.

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