I am an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal (UdeM). I am the co-director of the Laboratory for the Future of Citizenship, an affiliate of the Centre de Recherche en Ethique (CRE), the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Normativité (GRIN), the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study Project on Space, Time and Consciousness, and the Canadian Metaphysics Collaborative.
My primary research is in the philosophy of consciousness. I also have research interests in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the metaphysics of science, applied ontology, moral psychology, value theory, and legal and political philosophy.
Jump to: publications, teaching, or Laboratory for the Future of Citizenship. Download my CV
My Phil People Profile
My Google Scholar Profile
My Github Profile
Before that, I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and a Mellon post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane University.
I received my Ph.D. from NYU in May 2012. My dissertation is titled “The Sharp Contour of Consciousness.” In it, I argue that the concept ‘phenomenally conscious’ is not vague (it is sharp), that phenomenal consciousness is, in a fairly weak sense, a joint in nature (it is a contour), and that these theses together make for a serious new challenge to some versions of materialism.
Before graduate school I worked in logic and knowledge representation at IFOMIS, the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, then in Leipzig, Germany. Before that, I majored in philosophy and minored in mathematics at Columbia University.
My Erdős Number is at most 4 (Barry Smith – Yehoshua Perl – Shmuel Zaks – Erdős. Alternate Path: Yoshua Bengio – Max Tegmark – Harold Seymour Shapiro – Erdős).
Jonathan Simon-s of academia, from A to Z:
- I am Jonathan A. Simon.
- I have publications that talk about AI and computation; some are co-authored with folks from MILA and Google. But I am not this Jonathan (D.) Simon.
- I have publications about medicine, about longevity and about the philosophy of science. But I am not this Jonathan Simon.
- I have some publications that talk about math (and topology in particular). But I am not this Jonathan Simon.
- I have some publications that talk about physics, and I am from Montgomery County, Md. But I am not this Jonathan Simon.
- I have some publications that talk about law. But I am not this Jonathan (S.) Simon.
- I have some publications that talk about neuroscience, and some that talk about time travel. But I am not this Jonathan (Z.) Simon.