Andrew Lee

I did my undergrad in psychology at Williams College, studied for a year at Oxford where I grew lasting interests in philosophy, and started attending UCLA in 2022. A few years ago, it occurred to me that the mind was somewhat of a paradox. Given that neurons are relatively simple information processors, how did putting a whole bunch of them together give rise to singular, cohesive concepts like “dog” and “love?” Digging for insight, it turned out that I didn’t know what I was talking about. What even is a concept? What is a representation? How do we learn, reason, and make decisions? In following these questions over the past several years, I found myself somewhere in-between the fields of category learning, relational reasoning, and perceptual decision-making. These interests have mostly converged on the problem of induction while at UCLA, and so I’ve been studying how we learn concepts that are most difficult for modern machines, such as relational concepts like “love” and “diplomacy.”