University of Sydney
Doctor of Philosophy
Research Training Program Stipend Scholarship
Curriculum vitae
Ben Gaskin
Sydney, Australia · bgas0204 at uni.sydney.edu.au
Last updated October 2026
Summary
How is mind related to the world it encounters? More specifically, how do mind, concepts, and information arise from material relations, and how do these apparent intangibles come to organise those relations in turn?
Early cognition and biological information provide the current focus, drawing together philosophy, science, and computational modelling. Models make theoretical commitments explicit: as Feynman put it, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
Education
University of Auckland
Master of Arts in Philosophy
Research Masters Scholarship, First Class Honours
University of Auckland
Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Philosophy
First Class Honours
University of Auckland
Graduate Diploma in Philosophy
University of Auckland
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Politics
Publications
Paul Kraus. English translation and scholarly edition, Zenodo, version 1.0
Translated and edited by Ben Gaskin · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23174647
Artificial Life 2026 Conference Proceedings
DevNCA: co-evolving developmental patterns & plasticity rules for self-organising SNNs
Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 37 (1), 12
Social Robots with AI: Prospects, Risks, and Responsible Methods, pp. 35–42, IOS Press
Philosophical Journal of Conflict & Violence, 7 (2)
Presentations
Wallace Marshall’s laboratory, University of California, San Francisco
Artificial Life 2026
Artificial Life 2026
ECogS, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Asada Laboratory, Osaka University
Artificial Life, Kyoto
TONAL Workshop, Artificial Life, Kyoto
Models of Consciousness, Sapporo
Australia/New Zealand Philosophy of Biology Workshop
Robophilosophy, University of Aarhus
The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Consciousness, Jagiellonian University
Agency and Language in Artificial Intelligence, University of Göttingen
International Society of East Asian Philosophy, Fukuoka University
Containment and many-sidedness: a comparative study of Aristotelian and Jain logics
World Congress on Logic and Religion
Where are words? Predictive processing and the cognitive penetration of language
Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference
Projects
Embodied collectives with locally adapting neural units
With Polyphony Bruna, Ian Jackson and William O’Hearn, through DISI 2026
Interactive evolution of procedural visual worlds
JAX port and extension of the EvoGym soft-body robotics environment for GPU-accelerated population-scale simulation
Convening
Special session, Artificial Life 2026
Co-organised with Simon McGregor
Workshop, Artificial Life 2026
Co-organised with Jason Yoder, Anselmo Pontes, and Austin Ferguson
Service
Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life
ISAL Board Representative
International Society for Artificial Life
Representative for Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life (ERA)
Skills
Research
- Disciplines
- philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, artificial life, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, developmental cognitive science, theoretical biology
- Methods
- literature review, computational modelling, experimental design, statistical analysis, simulation validation, reproducible research
- Communication
- writing, proofreading and editing, scholarly translation, audiovisual presentation, public speaking, consulting
Technical
- Languages
- python, typescript, english
- Libraries
- jax, mlx, pytorch, taichi, quadrants, hydra, weights & biases
- Computational neuroscience
- spiking neural networks, neuroevolution, coding and decoding, plasticity, architecture search
- Evolutionary computation
- genetic algorithms, direct and indirect encoding, quality diversity, multi-objective optimisation
- Models
- neural cellular automata, soft-body and fluid simulation, agent-environment models
Development
Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
Fellow