Research
The following are selections of my research-oriented writing on consciousness, evolution, and artificial intelligence.
Samples of my technical writing, including conceptual explainers and developers tutorials, can be found here.
For my tech journalism work, see my VentureBeat author page.
Selections on Consciousness, Cognition, and Evolution
- WORKING DRAFT: The Phylogenetic Distribution of Consciousness
- “A Multi-Trait Embodied Framework for the Evolution of Brains and Cognition Across Animal Phyla”, 2024/forthcoming (still accepting commentary!) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, co-authored with S. Coombs
- “Energy and Expectation: The Dynamics of Living Consciousness.” Biosemiotics 16.2 (2023): 269-279.
- “Minds and bodies in animal evolution.” The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds. Routledge, 2017. 206-215.
- With Colin Allen, “Animal consciousness.” The Blackwell companion to consciousness (2017): 63-76.
- The Modal Breadth of Consciousness
- “The Cambrian explosion and the origins of embodied cognition.” Biological Theory 8 (2013): 80-92.
- Trestman, Michael. “Clever Hans, Alex the parrot, and Kanzi: What can exceptional animal learning teach us about human cognitive evolution?.” Biological Theory 10 (2015): 86-99.
- Trestman, Michael A. “Implicit and explicit goal-directedness.” Erkenntnis 77 (2012): 207-236.
- Trestman, Michael. Goal-Directedness, behavior and evolution: A philosophical investigation. University of California, Davis, 2010.
- Animal Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Trestman, Michael. “The modal breadth of consciousness.” Philosophical Psychology 27.6 (2014): 843-861.
Selections on Artificial Intelligence
- WORKING DRAFT: Open Watchbot Transparency: A proposed framework for distributed governance of agentic AI systems
- WORKING DRAFT: A Proposal for a Human Authorship Verification Service, a designed-to-last solution for identifying genuine human writing and thought in the age of AI.
- Agentic AI: A deep dive into the future of automation