Robert Prentner Assistant Professor

2013-2017 - ETH Zürich, Ph.D. in Philosophy

2008-2012 - ETH Zürich, Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Sciences (Physical Chemistry)

2008-2012 - ETH Zürich, Master of Arts in History and Philosophy of Knowledge

2021-2024 – Lecturer, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich (Germany)

2021-2023 – Senior Research Fellow (Honorary), Florida Atlantic University (United States)

2020-2021 – Independent Research Consultant (Switzerland)

2018-2020 – Postdoc, University of California, Irvine (United States)

Robert Prentner is a philosopher and interdisciplinary scientist working on scientific idealism, consciousness studies, and the philosophy of science and nature. His work has appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Entropy, Consciousness and Cognition, Mind and Matter, and Neuroscience of Consciousness. His research currently focuses on the scientific study of consciousness within a non-reductive paradigm as well as the mathematization of phenomenology, appealing to topology and category theory. Consciousness is thereby understood as an organizing principle of reality. This research aims to establish a novel framework of thinking that can integrate scientific research, technological developments (specifically: AI), and insights generated within the humanities.

In the past, Robert has also carried out research in molecular quantum dynamics (physical chemistry), which has been published in leading journals in the field. He is interested in the philosophy and history of science and its contextualization within Western and Eastern philosophical worldviews.

Scientific idealism assumes that (“phenomenal”) consciousness is deeply related to the nature of reality. By contrast, reality appears in a processual way, namely in terms of an everchanging set of relations across space and time. Nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature. The sciences have a special role in elucidating reality’s relational structure, whereas the study of consciousness aims at an (in the best case: mathematical) account of how our individual (but limited) minds can be part of the ideal and non-dual nature of reality. A similar model has been advocated by the Greek philosopher Plato, who distinguished an unchanging realm of ideas from a processual empirical world. That which never changes and always is and that which always changes but never is. Other notable figures in the West include the philosophers G.W. Leibniz, Arthur Schopenhauer, A.N. Whitehead, and modern scientists such as the founder of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger. Related ideas can also be found in various Asian wisdom traditions such as Daoism, Vedanta, or Yogacara. 

In his research, Robert is particularly interested in how such views can be integrated into a modern scientific worldview. The theory of conscious agents is a contemporary model in this field, which links natural and cognitive sciences. It has been developed by Donald Hoffman and co-workers at the University of California, Irvine. Conscious agent theory formalizes the assumption that networks of conscious agents constitute reality. Processes in space and time, as studied by physics, refer to the appearance of such networks. A guiding metaphor to understand the relation between mind and matter in conscious agent theory is the metaphor of of the desktop interface. We interact with the network of conscious agents via material objects, just as we interact with a computer via icons on a desktop. Generically, the icons do not resemble the processes that happen inside the computer (this would make the desktop likely unusable). By the same token, physical objects and consciousness do not stand in any relation of similarity (more technically: iso- or homomorphism between the structure of our physical environment and the structure of consciousness). Trying to “squeeze out” consciousness from material objects (such as brains) essentially tries to reason backwards. Put more generally, physics describes our interface and spacetime is its desktop. We need to understand how the network of conscious agents appears on our spacetime desktop, not how events in spacetime magically give rise to conscious experiences.

A rigorous way to study the relation between consciousness and the physical world proceeds via category theory, a (meta-)mathematical analysis of systems in terms of structured domains. Following a recent proposal, one could conceive of mind and matter as two such systems. Previous results from the evolutionary study of perception finds that the relation between these domains is generically not a homomorphism. Still, one would expect to find a lawful relation between them. Category theory knows different, weaker kinds of “sameness” that could inform us, in a principled way, how the relation between networks of conscious agents and interfaces should be conceived. Alluding to the desktop metaphor, a functorial relation describes how networks of conscious agents project into spacetime. Ongoing work is devoted to finding a mapping from consciousness to fundamental physics (elementary particles). Generalizing the same mathematics to the categorical setting, one would possibly be able to directly map consciousness to brain processes, thereby understanding the so-called neural correlates of consciousness, arguably the most pressing issue in contemporary neuroscience.   

 What are possible applications of this framework? The first is philosophical and helps to integrate science with continental philosophy, also building on the philosophy of enactivism. Rather than being something pre-given, reflecting the “natural attitude” that we normally live in, reality is constituted by our experiences, expectations, memories, and beliefs. The idea that consciousness is intimately related to the way we perceive a world in terms of (material) objects that appear to (immaterial) selves has been predated philosophically by phenomenology, conceived in the early 20^th century by Edmund Husserl and others. We live in a self-centered world that we have created! Typically, this stems from interactions between two co-emergent entities (self and world) that form the relata of the processes that represent (non-dual) consciousness. Put differently, we create ourselves and thereby enact our world. This is as true on the level of the brain, as it is true on the level of bio-molecular processes, more generally. This position is consistent with conscious agent theory, as long as we distinguish (embodied) selves from the ultimate nature of reality (i.e. non-dual forms of consciousness) and regard both self and world as interface representations of networks of consciousness agents. The (embodied) self corresponds to the way a conscious agent represents itself as center of its spacetime interface.

One could also reconceive the role of technology in this framework. Refining the question of how computers can become conscious one could ask how it is possible to use artificial intelligence to create new interfaces to consciousness. The question is not how material (informational) processes can be put together to create consciousness but how they would help us to “see” previously unseen forms of consciousness around us. A first approach would perhaps be to scramble and rearrange our previously used representations (like words) to make sense of the world. This seems to be the current state of play in LLMs or generative AI. In a future approach, artificial intelligence would help us to design totally novel ways of representing consciousness that appeal to, for example, different dimension of space and time, entire new languages, or different linkages between “mental concepts” (comparable to the new concepts that humans learn when they are exposed to foreign languages). Technology is shaping the way we can think, and our thinking shapes the technology we can build. We could build AIs that are self-less but give us a glimpse into the realm of conscious agents, but we could also have artificial selves that only behave as if. We must not thereby lose our humanity in the process.

In addition to opening up fresh ways of understanding emerging technologies or the relation between consciousness and the natural world, this framework provides a novel outlook on philosophical topics such as the (dis)unity of science, scientific realism, evolutionary epistemology, the philosophy of mathematics, or the history of science and technology. Before joining ShanghaiTech, Robert worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the University of Munich and the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-editing the transdisciplinary journal Mind and Matter and co-organizer of the Models of Consciousness conference series.

D.D. Hoffman, C. Prakash, and R. Prentner. Fusions of Consciousness, Entropy, 25(1), 129, 2023.

R. Prentner. Dr Goff, Tear Down This Wall! The Interface Theory of Perception and the Science of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28(9-10), 91-103, 2021.

C. M. Signorelli, J. Szczotka, and R. Prentner. Explanatory profiles of models of consciousness - towards a systematic classification, Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021(2), 2021.

R. Prentner. Consciousness and Topologically Structured Phenomenal Spaces, Consciousness and Cognition, 70: 25-38, 2019.

R. Prentner. The natural philosophy of experiencing, Philosophies, 3(4): 35, 2018. (reprinted in G. Dodig-Crnkovic and M. J. Schroeder (eds.), Contemporary Natural Philosophies – Part 1, Basel: MDPI, pp. 324-337, 2019)

R. Prentner. Process Metaphysics of Consciousness, Open Philosophy, 1(1): 3-13, 2018.

R. Prentner. Consciousness: A Molecular Perspective, Philosophies, 2(4): 26, 2017.

C. Fields, D. Hoffman, C. Prakash, and R. Prentner. Eigenforms, interfaces and holographic encoding, Constructivist Foundations, 12(3): 265–274, 2017.