About me
I write, study, and help people learn. I have written books and other things. Some of these are meant for those who study the same things as I do, and others are meant for everyone.
What I do*
I especially work on attention. What is attention? What does attention feel like? What should we pay attention to?
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.
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.
I also 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. In addition, I co-lead an interdisciplinary Convergence Environment at UiO:Life Science on Consciousness, and I was involved in research on Artificial Intelligence.
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