Below is a list of some of the external grants I have been awarded for research projects, both as a principal investigator and as a co-investigator. These span the metaphysics of mind, epistemic norms and normativity, Artificial Intelligence, and Meta-Ethics. For a full list of the grants and awards I have received, see my CV.
As Principal Investigator
Cogito Machina: Investigating the Emergence of Artificial General Intelligence
Stiftelsen Marcus och Amalia Wallenbergs Minnesfond (2025-2028)

‘Cogito machina’—Latin for I, a machine, think—was suggested by ChatGPT as a title for this project. This response gave me pause. Can ChatGPT think? Did it understand my question? Not long ago, thinking machines might have seemed a long way off, if not the stuff of science fiction. However, recent technological advances in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have brought about a sea change in their capabilities. Current generation LLMs appear to be able to write poetry, do advanced mathematics, or tell you how to bake a cake, leading some to suggest that they show sparks of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and a genuine understanding of language. Others argue that these systems merely mimic the behaviour of intelligent beings, without showing genuine understanding or intelligence. After all, LLMs are just artificial neural networks, trained on huge corpora of data to predict the most likely continuation of a string of text. Though ChatGPT can tell you how to bake a cake, it has never come into contact with a cake, let alone baked one. The trouble is that existing benchmarks of AGI test performance, so they don’t discriminate mimicry from true AGI. This project aims to fill this gap by answering the following research questions: What is required for AGI? How can we tell whether a system has AGI? Do current and emerging AI systems possess AGI to some degree?
Beyond Reductionism: Contingent Grounding and the Mind-Body Problem (2022-2025)
Swedish Research Council

This project concerns the question: how does the mind relate to the physical world? Two views have traditionally been defended: physicalism, on which matter is more fundamental than mind; and dualism, on which matter and mind are equally fundamental. Defenders of these views have mainly debated whether mind and matter are in principle separable. In this project, we reframe the debate by articulating and exploring two competing but related views: contingent grounding physicalism, and grounding dualism. According to both views, while the mind metaphysically depends on matter for its existence, the metaphysical laws governing the connection between mind and matter are contingent. The difference is that the dualist, but not the physicalist, holds that mind is sui generis, having an essential nature that sets it apart from the physical. In developing these views, we show that the mind-body debate must focus on the nature of matter and how the mind arises from it. (Swedish Research Council 2022-01827)
The Foundations of Epistemic Normativity (2018-2020)
Riksbankens jubileumsfond
Epistemic normativity raises foundational questions concerning the semantics, metaphysics and epistemology of epistemology; questions that are traditionally asked about moral claims, such as the claim that murder is wrong. Do normative epistemic claims represent reality, or do they only signal the approval of a policy? Are some of the claims true in an absolute sense, or are they only true relative to a certain perspective? If they are true in an absolute sense, are there objective facts that make them so? And is it possible for us to have knowledge about these facts? In this project, Corine Besson and I defended Robust Realism, which answers in the affirmative to all of the above questions. We are critical of a dominant anti-realist trend in foundational epistemology, which mainly derives from the conception of epistemology as a normative discipline.
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As Co-Investigator
Cultural Evolution in Digital Societies (2022-2026)
Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Association
There are pressing concerns about the consequences of digital information technologies on human society. How will these technologies affect cooperation, exploitation, equality, and democracy? How will they impact the quality of the information that is circulated and the spread of knowledge and misinformation? The starting point of this research project is the hypothesis that the emergence of modern IT, such as computer software, the internet, social media, databases and AI, can be understood as “a transition in evolution”, in which the way in which information is stored, spread and manipulated undergoes drastic change. Magnus Enquist (PI), Fredrik Jansson, and I build on evolutionary models to study how conditions change when new information pathways are formed, when AI are capable of processing and transmitting information on their own, and when they act with increasing autonomy from human control.
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