A Brief Introduction

At the moment my research can be divided into two strands. I’m interested in what has been termed neuroaesthetics, the collusion of philosophy, aesthetics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I’ve also become, once again, increasingly interested in globalization, economics and urbanization.

My background is in mathematics, or rather, econometrics, and philosophy. This sort of explains why I believe in models or numbers. I don’t believe in universal laws, apart from those found in mathematics, physics and chemistry. I do believe in certain tendencies or propensities. This is what data analysis and a model can reveal.

I also believe that some abstract concepts are universally applicable, but that to apply them they have to be adapted to the situation. If you take a phenomenon such as disgust you find that, across different cultures, people are disgusted by different things, there is no common core apart from the capacity for disgust itself. This capacity can be retraced to some brain areas that are activated whenever a person feels disgust. In the absence of stimuli this capacity can lie dormant.

In a similar way we could ask how other abstract concepts or phenomena are organized and canalized in different societies.

I also like to think about the ripple effects of inventions and new products such as mobile phones, digital photography, email, mp3's etc. The advent of mp3 players means the demise of the traditional car radio, which means fewer car audio thefts, but the first cause of the thefts still exists, so the thieves (the actors) will search for a different target and the phenomenon will shift to another field.

To give another example, today there's a mobile phone shop around every corner, but what kind of shops were there ten years ago? Well shops selling watches perhaps, since sales of cheap watches have plummeted now that people use their mobile phone to look for the time.

My thinking has been influenced by post-structuralist philosophy and complexity theory. One of the central tenets in complexity theory is that the interaction of a set of simple rules can give rise to complex behavior. Such behavior is often termed emergent, because its seeds cannot be found in any of the individual rules, but only in their interaction.

Reading philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy and more recently Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek, has made me aware of the historical contingency of the categories that guide our thinking and of the philosophical notions embedded in the language with which we try to explain the world and express our thoughts.

My research is truly interdisciplinary. I believe that specialization is one of the curses of contemporary science. Fields of inquiry get ever narrower and most scientists don't have or take the time to also read about what's happening in other areas of research.

Interdisciplinarity for me does not stop at different scientific disciplines. I believe that there is also information embedded in novels, works of art and other cultural artefacts.