My Biography

I am at the Centre for Time from 2005–2010 as an arc Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow in conjunction with an arc Discovery Project with Huw Price and Guido Bacciagaluppi, studying time, probability and quantum mechanics. I received my Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997, taught at the University of Arizona before coming to Sydney, and have also held a Mellon Fellowship at Stanford, and an neh fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

My Interests

Most of my work falls into one of two classes. The first class circumscribes central concerns of the philosophy of physics. Interests there include the structure of space and time, the foundations of quantum mechanics, the role of simplicity and symmetry in physics, and questions about the nature of probability, natural laws and causal relations. The second class includes mind, cognition, phenomenology, and the nature of perspective.

As successful as physics has been in some respects, there are certain anomalies that are hard to assimilate to a physical world-view and that are only emerging with greater clarity as physics develops. In the last few years, I’ve been particularly interested in arguments that purport to show that physics is in some manner inadequate or incomplete. So, for example, phenomenal consciousness, the flow of time, the openness of the future, and freedom of the will were all said to part of our everyday experience that could not be assimilated by a physical ontology. These arguments raise some very interesting issues about what physics is up to, the standards of completeness for physics, about what should appear in a fundamental description of reality and about how to fill the great yawning gap between that level and the embedded experience of the embodied observer.

Filling that gap involves two movements, one vertical and one horizontal. The vertical movement requires understanding how high-level structures are stabilized out of low-level interactions. The horizontal movement requires understanding how an active mind coupled to a changing environment generates personal level experience. There have been huge changes and advances in scientific thinking on both fronts, and on both fronts the developments have been unanticipated and transformative. Research on complexity has undermined entrenched philosophical assumptions about the relationship between the large and the small. Scientific study of the mind has forced us to acknowledge that the objects and structures disclosed in experience are not a transparent reflection of the mind-independent structure of reality, but distilled out of coupled interaction between mind and environment as part of a user interface honed over generations to produce adaptive behavior. Assimilating these lessons and using them to address some of the open questions and emerging anomalies has been an organizing theme for the last few years.