I am an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sussex and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge. Before this, I was a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2018 under the supervision of Richard Holton and Huw Price.
My work has been cited or discussed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Politico, The LA Review of Books, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Daily Beast, Unherd, The Critic, and other outlets.
I work mostly in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and social epistemology, although I also have interests in artificial intelligence, moral psychology, political philosophy, general philosophy of science, psychiatry, and economics. Alongside several other academic projects, I am currently writing two books. The first (Why it’s OK to be Cynical; under contract with Routledge) defends and explores the implications of a tragic view of human nature. The second (Delusions in the Social Mind; co-authored with Sam Wilkinson and Kengo Miyazono and under contract with Oxford University Press) explores the under-appreciated role of human sociality in driving both clinical delusions and “extraordinary popular delusions” that prevail in the general, non-clinical population.
The primary focus of my research is why people believe what they do, especially when they seem to believe things that are strange, irrational, or otherwise surprising. Part of this project is on individual psychology and irrationality. (I wrote up a brief and accessible overview of some of my ideas on this topic here. I’m also interviewed about some of this research here, here, and here.) However, it also involves exploring the social and political contexts within which people form and share beliefs, including false and irrational beliefs. Here, I am especially interested in broader questions about the epistemology of democracy and technocracy, and in how advances in artificial intelligence are increasingly likely to shape people’s political beliefs and ideologies.
Before this, my earlier research drew on recent advances in neuroscience and machine learning to address foundational philosophical questions about the mind, especially concerning the role of mental representation in perception and cognition. For example, my PhD thesis drew on work in neuroscience (“predictive processing”) that depicts the brain as a probabilistic prediction machine to develop a framework for understanding how mental representation emerges in the natural world. You can find the thesis here and find accessible overviews of each chapter here.
I have many other research interests, including:
- the nature and evolution of human morality and cooperation;
- the philosophy of psychiatry;
- the philosophy of economics and social science;
- the risks and opportunities associated with developments in artificial intelligence;
Find me on academia here: https://cambridge.academia.edu/DanielWilliams
On researchgate here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Williams53
On Google Scholar here: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=JETVbM0AAAAJ&hl=en
On the HearThisIdea podcast: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/dan (the first interview) and https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/williams/ (the second interview)
On the Game Changer podcast: https://tws-gamechanger.libsyn.com/
On the Blocked and Reported podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3EbwsfZ84GHAZLz9iRPVF5
On The Dissenter podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHXCc2pcg38
On the Unlocking Science (Episode 2, “How do we talk about science and identity?”) podcast: https://council.science/podcast/unlocking-science/
Dan Williams Philosophy 