about
The student behind the work.
Consistent passion across sixteen philosophy units. Years of cognitive science study inside and outside the academy. One consistent thread — a hunch that the mechanisms cognitive science already has might explain more than we've asked them to.
(Marianne McAllister)
(based in Australia)
I'm a philosophy graduate who believes rigorous theory need not 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 masters-level 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 semester 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 main focus, and I aim to develop it academically within a postgraduate program.
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 of agency. 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.