Nadine Meertens, M.A.

Personal information

Nadine Meertens completed her M.A. in philosophy at the University of Bern, after which she joined the Cognition, Values and Behaviour lab at LMU Munich as a PhD candidate. Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, biology, and artificial intelligence. She is focused primarily on the application of theory and concepts from the philosophy of animal minds to artificial systems. A specific focus lies on comparative cognition and the beginnings of cognition, consciousness, and awareness.

Research interests

Awareness, animal minds, comparative cognition, artificial intelligence, evolution.

PhD project

Title: A conceptual framework for collaborative awareness

The main goal of this project is to develop a new concept of "awareness". I present a novel conceptual framework for measuring and comparing awareness in individual agents and in groups or distributed systems. Using the "conceptual engineering" method, a revision of existing concepts of awareness is offered that is distinct from the ongoing debates about awareness. In this way, a manner of structuring bottom-up research on the capabilities of a variety of animals is offered. Beyond non-human animals, this new concept and framework will be applied to (minimal) artificial systems and extended for application to heterogeneous and homogeneous groups. This research is part of the EMERGE project, whcih focuses on emergent awareness in minimal collectives, and which is funded by the European Union.

Selected publications

• Meertens, N. (2024). Hedonic valence at the core of consciousness: A review of “A philosophy for the science of animal consciousness” by Walter Veit. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 5.