Shepherd, Joshua L.

Research Professor at
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Humanities
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Research interests

Much of my research in the last five years has been devoted to my ERC Starting Grant. This work uses the methods of philosophy, and (where appropriate) cognitive science, and seeks to reinvigorate the conceptual foundations of agency, to map the phenomenology of agency onto the structure and function of action control capacities, and to understand how aspects of consciousness contribute to our capacities to select, initiate, and control different types of action.

An important part of this research involves engagement with the sciences of the mind (e.g., psychology, sport psychology, cognitive and motor neuroscience) in order to understand the psychological constitution of agency, and the ways that sophisticated behavior is controlled. Recent work along this line includes papers on the experience of acting (in The Journal of Philosophy), the relationship between (unconscious) perception and central coordinating agency (in Philosophical Studies), mind wandering and cognitive control (in Neuroscience of Consciousness), the nature of flow (in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences), and relationships between propositional thought and sensorimotor processes in skilled action (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research).

My work also explores the conceptual foundations of agency. In my book The Shape of Agency I offer novel, interlinked accounts of control, intentional action, and skill. In more recent work, I have addressed the place of knowledge in intentional action (‘Knowledge, practical knowledge, and intentional action’), and the nature of moral skill (‘Practical structure and moral skill’).

I am also interested in the moral significance of consciousness. My first book Consciousness and Moral Status develops an account of the moral value of phenomenal consciousness. In subsequent work, some of it in collaboration with bioethicists, I am exploring difficult moral issues surrounding the moral status of non-humans, and the ethics of research using cerebral organoids.

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Research interests

One of my main research interests is understanding the origins of complexity in living and artificial systems, and how major transitions can be explained by means of statistical physics approaches. To this goal, my Lab develops both theoretical and experimental research, including complex networks, evolutionary unstable dynamics (RNA viruses and cancer) an ambitious program on synthetic biology. The later area includes an exploration of synthetic multicellular systems, biocomputation and synthetic swarm intelligence. Additionally, I have also created two research areas of my own, namely Liquid brains (developing a theory of cognitive networks beyond standard solid brains) and the concept of biosphere terraformation (developing synthetic biology motifs to engineer ecosystems facing future tipping points).

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