Research

The following are selections of my research-oriented writing on consciousness, evolution, and artificial intelligence.

Work in Progress

My main current long-term research project is my book, Deterrence and the Evolution of Social Life. This is a cross-disciplinary look at the important but often misunderstood concept of deterrence (when one intelligent creature or other cognitive ‘agent’ uses a threat to manipulate another), and how this has shaped the evolution of animals over the last half a billion years, and continues to shape human society and life on earth.

• WORKING DRAFT: Being under threat: Deterrence and the evolution of social systems. Chapter 1 Introduction

When I last updated the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Animal Consciousness, I was a bit frustrated by the format and intented to write a longer, more opinionated article, that includes more more concrete ‘nitty gritty’ details of philosophical theory and biological reality, such as extended discussion of the major lineages of animals.

The draft of this is here:

• WORKING DRAFT: The Phylogenetic Distribution of Consciousness.

Selections on Consciousness, Cognition, and Evolution

• ‘Animal Consciousness’ with Jonathan Birch and Colin Allen, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• “A Multi-Trait Embodied Framework for the Evolution of Brains and Cognition Across Animal Phyla”) Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2025), co-authored with S. Coombs

• “Multi-trait convergent trends in the evolution of brains and cognition”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2025)

• “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.
• 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.
• The Modal Breadth of Consciousness, Philosophical Psychology (2014)*
• “The Cambrian explosion and the origins of embodied cognition.” Biological Theory 8 (2013): 80-92.
• 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.

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.