University of Sydney
Doctor of Philosophy
Research Training Program Stipend Scholarship
2024–
Curriculum vitae
Ben Gaskin
Sydney, Australia · bgas0204 at uni.sydney.edu.au
Last updated October 2026
Summary
How is mind related to the world that it encounters and of which it is constituted? I am interested in how agency and intelligence arise from material relations, and how these apparent intangibles come to organise those relations in turn. Having previously worked on the material construction of concepts and cognition, my doctoral research extends this analysis to basal cognition and biological information. Following Dretske and Skyrms, I am interested in how information can participate causally in the physical dynamics of minimal systems.
Education
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
Sensing at the edges: synthetic specimens for early contractile coordination
Artificial Life 2026 Conference Proceedings
DevNCA: co-evolving developmental patterns & plasticity rules for self-organising SNNs
Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 37 (1), 12
Symbol grounding in the age of LLMs
Social robots with AI: prospects, risks, and responsible methods, pp. 35–42, IOS Press
After Babel, the horizontal war: city and technique in Jacques Ellul
Philosophical Journal of Conflict & Violence, 7 (2)
Presentations
Talks
Signalling to learn: learning through sender–receiver systems in the cell
Laboratory of Cell Geometry, University of California, San Francisco
Sensing at the edges: synthetic specimens for early contractile coordination
Artificial Life 2026
The biological bit: physical chemistry and information in living systems
Artificial Life 2026
Internally-funded improbability: a thermodynamic account of agency
ECogS, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Activity and knowledge: developmental robotics and the philosophical tradition
Asada Laboratory, Osaka University
Another kind of clay: intelligence as the shaping of intrinsic noise
TONAL Workshop, Artificial Life
Temporal continuity as an architectural constraint on machine consciousness
Models of Consciousness
Can a single cell learn?
Australia/New Zealand Philosophy of Biology Workshop
Symbol grounding in the age of LLMs
Robophilosophy, University of Aarhus
The symbol as such: morphological computation and perceptual consciousness
The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Consciousness, Jagiellonian University
Egocentric speech in children and machines
Agency and Language in Artificial Intelligence, University of Göttingen
Logic and artificial life: robotics and the later work of Kitarō Nishida
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
Posters
BrainlessLab: from cellular cognition to collective intelligence
International Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2026)
With Polyphony Bruna, Ian Jackson, and William O’Hearn
Neural computation as distributed graph rewriting
Maths in the Brain 2026
Projects
BrainlessLab
Embodied collectives with locally adapting neural units
With Polyphony Bruna, Ian Jackson, and William O’Hearn
Worldbreeder
Interactive evolution of procedural visual worlds
JAX-EvoGym
JAX port and extension of the EvoGym soft-body robotics environment for GPU-accelerated population-scale simulation
Convening
Artificial life as experimental philosophy
Special session, Artificial Life 2026
Co-organised with Simon McGregor
Origins and transitions in the evolution of learning
Workshop, Artificial Life 2026
Co-organised with Jason Yoder, Anselmo Pontes, and Austin Ferguson
Service
Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life
ISAL Board Representative
International Society for Artificial Life
Representative for Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life (ERA)
Development
Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
Fellow
EMBO/FEBS Lecture Course: Emergence & Evolution of Multi-Level Regulatory Systems
Skills
- Languages
- Python, TypeScript, English
- Libraries
- JAX, Taichi, PyTorch
- Methods
- evolutionary algorithms
- spiking neural networks
- neural cellular automata
- physical simulations