about
The person behind the research.
A High Distinction average across sixteen philosophy units. Three years building an original framework outside the academy. One consistent thread — that the mechanisms cognitive science already has can explain more than we've asked them to.
(Marianne McAllister)
(based in Australia)
I'm a philosophy researcher who believes rigorous theory shouldn't stay confined to where it was first applied.
I studied philosophy at Macquarie University, focusing on the broad landscape of Bayesian brain theories. My original interests were free will and moral responsibility, but I moved toward predictive processing (PP) after being exposed to the framework heavily during my degree.
Across my degree I completed several projects in this space, including a conference presentation at the Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP).
After graduating with a High Distinction average and a number of academic awards, I was accepted into the MRes program at Macquarie and completed much of the first year before taking a break. I didn't stop working during that time — I developed Adaptive, an original framework grounded in predictive processing, and have been running workshops on it. That work is now my primary research focus, and I'm formalising it academically ahead of postgraduate study.
Alongside Adaptive, I'm also actively developing a second, more theoretical project: translating Michael Bratman's planning theory of agency into the vocabulary of predictive processing, drawing on Andy Clark's active inference account. My interest in philosophy of science and predictive processing hasn't waned, and both projects are now feeding into the more structured academic setting I'm returning to.
approach
How i think.
Translate, don't just borrow
Both of my current projects take an established body of theory and ask what it would mean translated into a new vocabulary or context — Bratman's planning theory into predictive processing, and predictive processing's clinical mechanisms into a self-directed methodology. The translation is the work, not a shortcut around it.
Say what's established and what's extension
I'm careful to mark the line between what the literature already supports and where I'm proposing something new. Blurring that line might make an idea sound more finished than it is — and a good theory shouldn't need that.
Mechanism over metaphor
I'm drawn to frameworks that give old philosophical questions — about agency, free will, or the self — real mechanistic teeth, rather than just a new way of describing them.