Ellen Nora Burns

7th Year Graduate Student | Ph.D. program in Philosophy

Ellen is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy department specialising in the philosophy of mind, with additional interests in the philosophy of AI and the philosophy of language. She is focused on interdisciplinary work and exploring emerging issues at the intersection of these fields. One of her current projects is exploring the genesis of how we came to think of AI as potentially or definitely conscious. This project builds off of her dissertation, which examines the problem of how to explain our first-personal conscious experiences in scientific terms. She argues - contra a range of dominant views in the philosophy of mind- for the rescue of experience from the traditional Cartesian duality to present it as neither fully captured in immediate consciousness or phenomenology. With this alternative assessment of experience in place, she aims to shows why our lived experiences are better explained in terms of non-naturalist frameworks than they are in terms of physicality, panpsychicist, or other naturalist ones. Ellen also works on questions of freedom, the history of the problem of free will, and how mechanistic models of human behaviour influence current philosophical intuitions on the nature of free human choice.

Ellen is a Columbia College Core Preceptor for the academic year 2024-25. Before coming to Columbia, she received a first-class honours bachelor’s degree in French & Psychology from Trinity College, Dublin, and an M1 (‘Master 1’) in Contemporary Philosophy from PSL (Paris Sciences et Lettres), Paris.