About me
I I do research in philosophy of mind and psychology, philosophy of action, philosophy of biology, philosophy of language, as well as ethics and meta-ethics, epistemology and political philosophy. My specialty are philosophical issues about attention that arise in these areas. My research engages central philosophical topics about consciousness, agency, and normativity. It also involves dialogue with empirical and formal research, from the biosciences and psychology to economics, computer science, linguistics, and anthropology. I also work with people in mental health, technology, and law at the intersection of academia and policy making. I currently lead the GoodAttention and Salient Solutions Research Groups (supported by the ERC and Forskningsrådet). I also taught in a variety of areas and co-wrote and edited an introductory textbook.
What I do*
I work on questions about attention. What is attention? What does attention feel like? What should we pay attention to?
What is attention? Attention, I suggest, is the way the mind focuses. It is what orders the mind. With that order, we can use our mind better when we do things. Without attention, I hold, we would in fact not have a mind. Human attention, I hold, is something we do together - by using the world around us.
What does attention feel like? Attention feels, I suggest, like it comes from our self. This simple idea changes how we think about all feeling. Without attention, I suggest, we would in fact not feel anything. With attention, feeling is a kind of doing.
What should we pay attention? I study what is good attention and what is bad attention. Our group tries to match an answer to these questions with how attention actually works. We study where attention comes from, what it does for us, and how it is important for how we build our life together.
For a single person, attention is important for doing something well (but we should not always control it). It is also important for getting in a position to know things. And attention, finally, can also just fit. I work on these things and on how to bring them together.
When people live together, we can ask: which things and which people should they as a group pay attention to? Who has a right to control that? We work on problems that can come up here and help people learn about them. I myself especially study power and attention. This comes up in the state, between states, and when control over our attention is bought from us.
Academic bio
My research engages central philosophical topics about the nature of the mind, perception, consciousness, freedom and action, individual and society, rationality and ethics. My approach involves philosophical reflection in close dialogue with other disciplines including biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics and other social sciences. Currently, the main focus of my work is connecting questions of how attention works with questions of what deserves our attention, and what good and bad forms of attention are. I lead the ERC Consolidator Grant funded project called ‘GOODATTENTION’, and also manage the project Salient Solutions. Responding ethically to the attention crisis funded by the Norwegian Research Council. n the past, I co-lead an interdisciplinary Convergence Environment at UiO:Life Science on Consciousness, and I'm involved in research on Artificial Intelligence (e.g. I did some work on the ethics of AI in the military and currently participate in work on Attention in Epistemic Planning).
After an MA in biology at Humboldt University Berlin (focusing on honey bee navigation and computational neuroscience), I received an MA in philosophy from New York University and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University. I came to Oslo after a postdoc at the interdisciplinary Mind-Brain-Behavior program at Harvard University. I have been visiting professor at LMU Munich, and Umeå University. I have received a Young Talented Researchers Grant from the Norwegian Research Council, won the Sister Dals Resesarch Prize, and I was a core-group member of the Norwegian Centre of Excellence CSMN. Before starting the work on my current grants, I was co-founder and head of the Center for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS).
Pronouns: He/Him