Mathematical philosopher of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and wisdom.
I research psychedelics, contemplative traditions, and artificial intelligence to uncover structures of mind that survive across different experiences, brains, practices, and technologies.
Director
The Center for Psychedelic Space
An independent research centre investigating psychedelic space: the structured space of mind-revealing experiences.
Visit the Center ↗Co-founder
Mindful AI Solutions
Helping organisations become more capable with AI without becoming less wise.
Visit Mindful AI ↗External Member
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy
A research institution for formal methods in philosophy, where the mathematical side of the work is grounded.
See the research →Author
Oxford University Press
Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind — on what such experiences can and cannot show us.
See the book →What I do
I research consciousness, uncertainty and wisdom.
My work asks how we can understand and navigate situations in which our ordinary ways of knowing become unreliable: when evidence is incomplete, experience changes radically, or new technologies alter the processes through which we think and judge. I use philosophy, mathematics and empirical science to study the structures underlying consciousness and cognition, and the forms of judgment required to distinguish genuine insight from compelling illusion.
Psychedelics, meditation and contemplative traditions provide unusually rich ways of investigating transformations of consciousness. Artificial intelligence poses the complementary problem of what happens when parts of cognition itself can be delegated to machines. Across both, I am interested in a common question:
How can we expand what minds are capable of without losing the capacity to understand, discriminate and act wisely?
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Three dimensions of one project
01
Consciousness
Psychedelics, meditation, kuṇḍalinī and mystical experience.
I study how consciousness is organised and how that organisation can be transformed, asking whether radically different interventions—meditation, yoga and psychedelic drugs—produce corresponding transformations of mind. Rather than reducing contemplative ideas to brain regions, I look for structures that survive translation between phenomenology and neuroscience: patterns of differentiation, integration, stilling and release that can be formalised and tested.
02
Intelligence
Artificial intelligence, human cognition, judgment and authorship.
AI is changing not only what we can do, but our relationship to our own intelligence. When reasoning, writing and synthesis are performed with machines, which forms of cognition can be delegated, and what happens to understanding, judgment and authorship? Through Mindful AI Solutions I bring these questions into practice, helping organisations use powerful AI without surrendering the capacities that tell them what is worth thinking.
03
Wisdom
How should we navigate transformations of consciousness and intelligence?
Capability alone does not tell us what to attend to, what to trust, or what kinds of minds we should become. My work draws philosophy and contemplative practice together as traditions concerned less with acquiring knowledge than with cultivating attention, discrimination and judgment under uncertainty—and so with the question these fields share: how can such transformations enlarge human possibility without outrunning our capacity to navigate them?
Current research
The Psychedelic-Kundalini Thesis
Can an ancient contemplative map predict what
psychedelic substances do to the brain?
The Psychedelic–Kuṇḍalinī Thesis asks whether contemplative traditions discovered reproducible transformations of consciousness long before we had the mathematical and neuroscientific language to describe them. We translated classical accounts of kuṇḍalinī into structural predictions, tested those predictions in fMRI data from chakra meditation, and then asked whether the same transformations appeared independently in pharmacological data.
03 / Two institutional expressions
Mapping the field of consciousness
Center for Psychedelic Space
The Center for Psychedelic Space is an independent research centre investigating the structure and transformation of consciousness. We bring philosophy, neuroscience, psychedelics and contemplative traditions together to map mind-revealing states—and to ask whether forms of knowledge preserved in contemplative traditions can be made mathematically precise and scientifically testable.
Visit the Centre →Solving real business problems
Mindful AI Solutions
Mindful AI Solutions helps organisations become more capable with AI without becoming less wise. As more of the work of thinking is delegated to machines, we focus on the human capacities that matter most: judgment, attention, understanding, authorship and responsibility. Our workshops help teams develop these capacities while learning to work intelligently with increasingly powerful AI.
Explore Mindful AI →Oxford University Press
The book
How experience can reveal the mind
Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind develops a philosophical account of what it means for an experience to be psychedelic. Starting from the idea of the psychedelic as mind-revealing, I introduce psychedelic space: a framework for understanding the different ways experience can make normally hidden aspects of mind available to awareness.
Psychedelic drugs are one route into this space, but not the only one. Meditation, mystical experience and spontaneous insight can also reveal the mind, sometimes in profoundly different ways. The book brings philosophy, cognitive science and contemplative traditions together to ask what these experiences reveal, how we should understand them, and how they might contribute to self-knowledge and wisdom.
Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind
Oxford University Press · 2023
Get in touch
Let's talk.
I'm always interested in conversations that connect with my work on consciousness, uncertainty and wisdom. Get in touch about research collaborations, the Center for Psychedelic Space, Mindful AI, speaking and workshops—or something else you think I should know about.
I read everything myself and reply when I can.