I'm a philosopher currently working on the philosophy of technology, AI, and aesthetics. In the past I have worked on perception and temporal experience. At the moment I'm a postdoctoral researcher on Enrico Terrone's ERC project, [The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts](https://pea.unige.it/), at the University of Genoa. My earlier research was on auditory perception. 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 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 AI and creativity, often 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. My CV is [[Notes/Nick Young CV 2026|here]].