Curriculum vitae
Ben Gaskin
Sydney, Australia · bgas0204 at uni.sydney.edu.au
Last updated June 2026
Summary
My work is united by an old problem: what is the relation between mind and the world it encounters? Here my research returns to this persistent question in a modern form: how do concepts and information, not to mention mind itself, arise from the dynamics of material relations—and how do these apparent intangibles come to structure those relations in turn?
While currently focused on early cognition and biological information, I approach this question broadly through philosophy of biology, artificial life, and developmental cognitive science. In practice, this means moving between conceptual analysis, empirical detail, and technical work.
I am especially interested in modelling as a tool for making theoretical commitments explicit: to model agency, learning, language, or cognition is to clarify what one takes these phenomena to require and put that theory to the test. Here I follow Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
Education
University of Sydney
Doctor of Philosophy
Research Training Program Stipend Scholarship
University of Auckland
Master of Arts in Philosophy
Research Masters Scholarship, First Class Honours
University of Auckland
Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Philosophy
First Class Honours
University of Auckland
Graduate Diploma in Philosophy
University of Auckland
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Politics
Publications
DevNCA: co-evolving developmental patterns & plasticity rules for self-organising SNNs
Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 37 (1), 12
Social Robots with AI: Prospects, Risks, and Responsible Methods, pp. 35–42, IOS Press
Philosophical Journal of Conflict & Violence, 7 (2)
Presentations
ECogS, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Asada Laboratory, Osaka University
Artificial Life, Kyoto
TONAL Workshop, Artificial Life, Kyoto
Models of Consciousness, Sapporo
Australia/New Zealand Philosophy of Biology Workshop
Robophilosophy, University of Aarhus
The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Consciousness, Jagiellonian University
Agency and Language in Artificial Intelligence, University of Göttingen
International Society of East Asian Philosophy, Fukuoka University
Containment and many-sidedness: a comparative study of Aristotelian and Jain logics
World Congress on Logic and Religion
Where are words? Predictive processing and the cognitive penetration of language
Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference
Projects
jax_evogym
JAX port and extension of the EvoGym soft-body robotics environment for GPU-accelerated population-scale simulation
JAX-accelerated implementation of Plank et al.’s neuromorphic CartPole benchmark for neuroevolving spiking-neural-network controllers.
ALIFE 2026 Workshop, organised with Jason Yoder, Anselmo Pontes, and Austin Ferguson.
ALIFE 2026 Special Session, organised with Simon McGregor.
Service
Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life
ISAL Board Representative
International Society for Artificial Life
Representative for Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life (ERA)
Skills
Research
- Disciplines
- philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, artificial life, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, developmental cognitive science, theoretical biology
- Methods
- literature review, computational modelling, experimental design, statistical analysis
- Communication
- writing, proofreading and editing, audiovisual presentation, public speaking, consulting
Technical
- Languages
- python, typescript, english
- Libraries
- jax, mlx, pytorch, taichi, hydra, weights & biases
- Computational neuroscience
- spiking neural networks, neuroevolution, coding and decoding, plasticity, architecture search
- Evolutionary computation
- genetic algorithms, direct and indirect encoding, quality diversity, multi-objective optimisation
- Models
- neural cellular automata, soft-body and fluid simulation, agent-environment models