My research is in the philosophy of mind and focuses on a few themes
Illusionism about consciousness
I defend an illusionist conception of phenomenal consciousness, according to which phenomenal consciousness does not exist, but simply seems to exist. My most up-to-date conception is presented in my book published in 2026 at Oxford University Press: House of Mirrors: The Illusion of Phenomenal Consciousness.
In my view, illusionism is correct, but it’s also a radically counter-intuitive conception of the mind. It’s even a conception that is hard to simply entertain, and prima facie seems absurd, or incoherent. In the book, I try to explain why, and why it should not prevent us from endorsing the view, with the help of a theory I call Meta-Cartesianism. A substantive part of the book (chapters 4-6) is devoted to presenting and advocating this view.
Prior to publishing this book, I have written a number of papers on the topic of illusionism, which can be found there. Francophone readers might also want to have a look at my book in French published in 2019. I also wrote an introductory article in French presenting illusionism.
The meta-problem of consciousness
Illusionism is sometimes discussed in the context of the more general problem of explaining why we say and think certain things about consciousness without any explicit reference to consciousness – what David Chalmers calls the “Meta-Problem of Consciousness”. I edited a collection on Chalmers’ meta-problem in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. The collection comprised two parts (published in September 2019 and May 2020), to be found here and here. My editorial introductions can be read here and here. I also criticized some promising theories tackling the meta-problem of consciousness here. My most up-to-date take on the meta-problem is to be found in my 2026 book, House of Mirrors.
Introspection
I also have an interest for introspection – partially related to my interest for consciousness. Together with Keith Frankish, I proposed a research programme on possible forms introspective systems could take, aiming notably at better understanding possibilities of introspection in non-human animals and machines. This article was the target paper for a symposium published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, featuring 15 contributions from philosophers and scientists, and our own response to these contributions.
Independently of this, with two co-authors (F. Cova and M. Gaillard) I studied the introspection of visual experiences by naïve subjects. We argued that, contrary to what some people supposed in some debates important for the science of consciousness (the debate regarding phenomenal overflow and the dissociation between access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness), naïve subjects do not find it intuitive that the content of their visual experiences significantly overflows what they can report (see here).
Philosophy of mind and technology
I have also been interested in the potential consequences of some forms of cognitive enhancement on the nature of our selves. I argued that certain uses of technology could help us to become more genuine selves (see here), and that freewill could be in some sense technologically enhanced (see here, in French).
Miscellaneous
Before I turned illusionist, I worked a bit on group consciousness: against the view that materialism about consciousness has the natural consequence that group entities such as countries have a genuine stream of consciousness (a strange consequence!), I argued for an anti-nesting principle allowing us to exclude some (but not all) cases of group consciousness. In the past years, I have also written on representationalism about consciousness (here and here, in French), on the technological singularity (here, in French) as well as on Nietzsche’s view of subjectivity (here, in French).