Research

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

Work in Progress

AI Safety

What does means for an AI service to be safe, really? What kind of testing methodologies and infrastructure could produce trustworthy evidence of that?

• WORKING DRAFT: The Hazards of AI: a 3d model
• Graphical Taxonomy of User Harms: a working taxonomy of the harms AI poses to its own users.
• 3d Visual systemic causal analysis tool for AI harms: an interactive tool for case analysis, loaded with data from several source studies. Load your own data set to visualize it. preloaded datasets:
• WORKING DRAFT: How to Survive the LLM Bullshit Apocalypse
• WORKING DRAFT: A Human-centered Theory of AI Safety

Formal Phenomenology / Active Inference Theory

I’m developing a modified version of active inference theory (AIT) with some simplified mathematical assumptions that also give a bit of philosophical and biological flexibility compared to Friston’s classic brain-based model. Working through the modeling assumptions forces tough questions about consciousnes! I want to use this in other work, including the AI Safety and Deterrence projects.

• WORKING DRAFT: Structures in Consciousness

Deterrence

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, technology, and life on earth.

• WORKING DRAFT: Deterrence and the evolution of social systems: Introduction

Published works on Consciousness, Cognition, and Evolution

• ‘Animal Consciousness’ 2025 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.