Research Overview

The human mind is rarely focused solely on the present moment.  We constantly turn our minds to long-past events, to our hopes and fears for the future, to detailed plans. Our thoughts are nearly all tensed. Our consciousness is a stream.  We define our selves and our dearest concerns relative to temporally extended projects.

Different species have very different relationships to time.  Diverse kinds of memory can be found across the animal kingdom.  Many animals cannot even represent the future beyond a few moments, and do not understand temporal-causal sequences. What difference does this make to how different kinds of minds work overall? What difference does it make to our moral relationships with other animals?  What can we learn from studying animals’ temporal capacities about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, decision-making, and rationality in general, as opposed to their particular manifestations in humans? 

My research focuses on a number of overlapping clusters of projects motivated by these questions, concerning decision-making and rationality across time, representation of and in time, consciousness across time, and different kinds of memory.