# I would like you to help me write an 'about' section for my website. it currently simply says \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\"I'... ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `32e3b9cf-60e9-4f98-9c4c-0f978ec24e0e` - Last activity: `2026-06-12T20:06:24.271Z` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User I would like you to help me write an 'about' section for my website. it currently simply says "I'm a philosopher interested in auditory perception, temporal experience, the phenomenology of agency, and the aesthetics of AI. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, The Philosophy of Experiential Artifactsu at the University of Genoa. My CV is here." Bu i would like you to help me work out something new, which says a bit more on my interests and my work etc.. I suggest you look at my publications (in the publications folder and the two unfished pieces I am currently working on generating philosophy with ai and the aesthetics of llms –both are the ones in the longgform plugin that i have recently worked on. on google drive you should also find a finsihed work by me and enrico about aesthetics of engineersing. I would like you to read all of this stuff and think how I can write something not more than a few paragraphs long, giving the essence of my work and interests. (also anything else you think i should put in. ### Assistant I'll gather the material first: your knowledge files, publications notes, the two manuscripts in progress, and the engineering aesthetics paper on Drive. Then I'll draft a few options. ### Assistant I have the publication abstracts. Now the two manuscripts and the engineering paper. ### Assistant I have the essence of both manuscripts and the engineering paper. Let me pull the abstracts of the remaining publications from what I extracted, so the draft is grounded in the actual papers. ### Assistant I have everything I need on the content side. Before drafting, let me check the voice files so this sounds like you. ### Assistant I've read everything: the publication abstracts, both manuscripts in progress (the generating philosophy sections and the aesthetics-of-LLMs longform), and the final submitted version of the engineering paper with Enrico. Quick summary of what I'm working from, then drafts. What strikes me reading it all together is that there is a genuine through-line you could make explicit: almost everything you've written concerns things that unfold in time and what it is to perceive or appreciate them. Reverberation and hearing empty space; hearing objects as extending through time; sounds as temporally extended properties; the feeling of oneself as the source of an action grounding belief in temporal passage; the aesthetics of a machine's functioning (as opposed to its function); LLM text propagating under semiotic forces. The auditory work, the agency work, and the AI work look like three phases from outside, but the about page can show them as one sensibility. Here are three versions, each a few paragraphs. All are written to replace the current text wholesale; keep the CV link line at the end of whichever you choose. ## Version A — the through-line version I'm a philosopher working on perception, temporal experience, and the aesthetics of technology. I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts, at the University of Genoa. Much of my work concerns things that unfold in time, and what it is to perceive and appreciate them. My earlier research focused on auditory perception: I've argued that we hear more than philosophers have tended to allow — not just sounds but the empty spaces in which they reverberate, and the objects and events that produce them, heard as extending through time. Related work on agency proposes that the experience of being the source of one's own actions is what gives rise to the common-sense belief that time passes. More recently I've been working on the aesthetics of artifacts and AI, mostly in collaboration with Enrico Terrone. We've argued that generative AI systems are best understood neither as agents nor as tools but as a new kind of artistic medium — something a user cultivates rather than wields — and that the operation of machines is a domain of aesthetic appreciation in its own right. My current projects continue in this vein: one argues that large language models can produce philosophy genuinely worth reading; another develops an environmental aesthetics of LLMs, on which models, like landscapes, can be appreciated as the products of forces we can come to understand. ## Version B — the shorter, drier version I'm a philosopher interested in what we perceive, how experience shapes what we believe, and how artifacts — from record players to language models — can be aesthetically appreciated. I'm a postdoctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts, at the University of Genoa. My published work falls into three areas. In the philosophy of auditory perception, I've argued that we hear empty spaces, that we hear objects as extending through time, and that sounds are best understood as temporally extended properties of objects. In the philosophy of temporal experience, I've argued that the belief that time passes is grounded in agentive rather than perceptual experience: in the feeling of being the source of one's own actions. And in aesthetics, with Enrico Terrone, I've written on design, engineering, and generative AI — including a paper arguing that systems like Midjourney are a new artistic medium, closer to a garden than to a paintbrush. I'm currently writing about large language models: whether they can produce philosophy worth reading (I think they can), and how the models themselves — not just their outputs — might be objects of aesthetic appreciation. ## Version C — the version that leads with the current work I'm a philosopher at the University of Genoa, where I work on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts. My current research concerns the aesthetics and philosophy of AI. With Enrico, I've argued that generative AI systems should be understood as a new kind of artistic medium rather than as agents or tools, and that engineering — the autonomous functioning of machines — constitutes its own domain of aesthetic experience. On my own, I'm developing two further lines of thought: that large language models are capable of producing philosophy genuinely worth reading, and that the models themselves can be appreciated in something like the way we appreciate natural environments — by attending to the order in their outputs, guided by knowledge of the forces that produce it. Before turning to AI, I worked on auditory perception and temporal experience. I've argued that we hear empty space when sounds reverberate, that hearing an object is hearing something extended through time, and that the belief that time passes arises from the experience of being the source of one's own actions. These interests persist in the newer work: in each case the question is how we experience things that unfold — sounds, actions, machines, text. ## Notes on choices, and what else to include I'd lean towards A or C. B is the most conventional academic-bio shape (three areas, enumerated), which is safe but a bit flat. A makes the unfolding-in-time connection do the structural work; C is the right choice if you want visitors (hiring committees, journalists, conference organisers) to immediately see you as an AI aesthetics person, with the perception work as background. None of them name journals or years — that's what the CV and a publications list are for, and the prose stays cleaner without them. Things I'd consider adding around the bio: - A selected publications list below the paragraph, with links (PhilPapers/PhilArchive or DOIs) — Growing the Image, Agents of Change, Hearing Spaces, Beauty in Use, plus the forthcoming Bloomsbury and Einaudi books. Much higher value to visitors than prose alone. - A contact email. The page currently has none mentioned. - A line for the Substack once it exists — an about page is exactly where it would earn readers, but I wouldn't announce it before launch. - Possibly a sentence on method — that you write with and through LLMs, which for someone arguing LLMs can produce philosophy worth reading is a point of integrity rather than a confession. Only if you're comfortable making that public; happy to draft it if so. Tell me which direction you like and I'll iterate — or mix: A's through-line sentence drops cleanly into C, for instance. *Chi scrive di macchine che funzionano da sole dovrebbe forse ammettere quanto gli piace guardarle lavorare.* ### User "Much of my work concerns things that unfold in time," .... ffs, this is so obviously inaccurate. I wanted one at least the length of a, maybe even another paragraph. but if you start off with a lie.. ### Assistant Fair — it was a manufactured through-line. Hearing empty space isn't about temporal unfolding, and the LLM aesthetics piece is about order and the forces that produce it, not time. I dressed three areas up as one. Here's a longer version that doesn't claim a unity the work doesn't have. Where there are real connections (agentive phenomenology runs from the time paper into Beauty in Use; the anti-agent, anti-tool line runs through the AI work), it uses those, and otherwise lets the areas stand as what they are. I'm a philosopher working on perception, temporal experience, and the aesthetics of AI and artifacts. I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts, at the University of Genoa. My earlier research was on auditory perception, and in particular on what we hear. Philosophers have tended to assume that hearing acquaints us with sounds and little else. I've argued that we hear considerably more than this: that when sounds reverberate we hear the empty space around us, that we hear objects and the events they participate in, and that sounds themselves are best understood as temporally extended properties of objects rather than as things in their own right. I've also written on temporal experience and agency. There I've argued that the common-sense belief that time passes is not grounded in perception, as is usually supposed, but in agentive experience: the feeling of being the source of one's own actions. That interest in agentive phenomenology carries over into my work on design, where I've used it to explain how an artifact can be beautiful in use — how the experience of acting with a thing, rather than just looking at it, can be aesthetically rewarding. Most of my current work is on the aesthetics of AI, largely in collaboration with Enrico Terrone. We've argued that generative AI systems are best understood neither as agents nor as tools but as a new kind of artistic medium, one a user cultivates rather than controls — closer to a garden than a paintbrush. We've also developed an account of the aesthetics of engineering, on which the autonomous functioning of machines is a domain of aesthetic appreciation in its own right. Two ongoing projects extend this work to large language models. The first argues that LLMs are capable of producing philosophy genuinely worth reading, and that the standard reasons for thinking otherwise — that there is no author behind the text, no inference, no consciousness — do not survive scrutiny. The second develops an aesthetics of LLMs themselves, on which models can be appreciated rather as we appreciate natural environments: by attending to the order in what they produce, guided by an understanding of the forces that shape it. That's five paragraphs; if you want it tighter, the second and third merge naturally (perception and agency as the pre-AI work). And the worth-reading clause in the fifth paragraph states your thesis plainly, which on a public page reads as confidence — but say the word if you'd rather it were hedged for visiting referees. *Un percorso intellettuale non ha bisogno di un filo unico per reggersi: bastano i passaggi reali da un problema all'altro.* ### User "the events they participate in, and that sounds themselves are best understood as temporally extended properties of objects " as a matter a fact, i don't believe this. My phd which you can probably find in drive is called against hearing sounds, i don't think we hear sounds a t all. The sounds as properties paper is a 'if sounds do exist then they could be a certain sort of property.. it was conditional ### Assistant Right — that's an important correction, and the abstract of Sounds as Properties does read as a within-the-debate proposal, so I took it as your committed view. Let me find the PhD and check how you actually frame the position before rewriting. ### Assistant Those are mostly drafts of a paper version. Let me read the abstract and the vault draft to get the position right. ### Assistant Found it — the position in the draft is clear: > I shall suggest here that common sense and philosophical orthodoxy are incorrect. We do not hear any of the aspects of the world that philosophers have identified as sounds. Rather, source events are heard directly without any type of sonic intermediary. To hear a source, I shall argue, is to hear a material object, meaning that audition is very much like seeing. So the about page should lead with that, and the published papers slot in around it: Hearing Objects and Events (hearing an object as extending through time) and Hearing Spaces (hearing empty space) are positive claims about what we do hear, and Sounds as Properties is the conditional concession. Here's the full revised draft with the second paragraph corrected; the rest is unchanged apart from the lead-in sentence: I'm a philosopher working on perception, temporal experience, and the aesthetics of AI and artifacts. I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts, at the University of Genoa. My earlier research was on auditory perception. Common sense and philosophical orthodoxy agree that hearing is, first and foremost, the hearing of sounds. I think both are wrong: my doctoral thesis, Against Hearing Sounds, argues that we don't hear sounds at all — we hear the material objects and events that produce sound waves, directly, without any sonic intermediary, making audition far more like vision than is usually supposed. Along the way I've defended related claims about what audition does acquaint us with: that to hear an event is to hear an object as extending through time, and that when sound waves reverberate we hear the empty space around us. I've also argued that if there are sounds, they would be best understood as temporally extended properties of objects. I've also written on temporal experience and agency. There I've argued that the common-sense belief that time passes is not grounded in perception, as is usually supposed, but in agentive experience: the feeling of being the source of one's own actions. That interest in agentive phenomenology carries over into my work on design, where I've used it to explain how an artifact can be beautiful in use — how the experience of acting with a thing, rather than just looking at it, can be aesthetically rewarding. Most of my current work is on the aesthetics of AI, largely in collaboration with Enrico Terrone. We've argued that generative AI systems are best understood neither as agents nor as tools but as a new kind of artistic medium, one a user cultivates rather than controls — closer to a garden than a paintbrush. We've also developed an account of the aesthetics of engineering, on which the autonomous functioning of machines is a domain of aesthetic appreciation in its own right. Two ongoing projects extend this work to large language models. The first argues that LLMs are capable of producing philosophy genuinely worth reading, and that the standard reasons for thinking otherwise — that there is no author behind the text, no inference, no consciousness — do not survive scrutiny. The second develops an aesthetics of LLMs themselves, on which models can be appreciated rather as we appreciate natural environments: by attending to the order in what they produce, guided by an understanding of the forces that shape it. One question on the new paragraph: naming the thesis title works well on a website (it's a good title, and it signals the view is developed at length), but only if you're happy foregrounding an unpublished position — the alternative is the same sentence without the thesis mention, just stated as your view. And I left the reverberation claim as "we hear the empty space around us" rather than the published paper's "when sounds reverberate", since the latter phrasing would reintroduce sounds through the back door. *Chi nega di sentire i suoni deve poi spiegare cosa riempie il silenzio che ne resta.*