Research interests

I am an interdisciplinary philosopher working on consciousness, language, and AI. After studying Psychology, Philosophy and Neuroscience, I wrote my dissertation at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the University of Magdeburg, working with Holger Lyre and John-Dylan Haynes.

I am currently working as a research assistant in the Philosophy Department at the University of Magdeburg. I will soon be moving to the Czech Academy of Sciences to work with Tomáš Marvan as part of a Feodor-Lynen-Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation.

My main area of research is structuralism as a methodology for the mind sciences. Structuralists define mental states by their relations to other mental states within a mental domain. For instance, a specific color percept is understood as a location in color space; red, for example, is defined as the color more similar to orange than green, and so on. The basic idea is to explain representational relations and the mind-body relation via structural similarity relations. This provides new methods for formalization and empirical research.

Structuralism as a framework enables fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. In my dissertation, I have extensively studied the limits and prospects of the structuralist approach in the study of consciousness, as well as in understanding mental representations. Building on my previous work, I now address the issue of AI consciousness, particularly in light of significant advances in brain organoid research—that is, artificial yet biological "mini-brains" cultivated from stem cells. I also collaborate with scientists to conduct empirical studies on color perception.