Hi! I’m Sofiia, a neurophilosopher and cognitive theorist based in London, working at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. My research asks how complex cognition and inner experience arise from basic predictive mechanisms—particularly through the mind’s ability to construct nested simulations of the past, future, and counterfactual worlds.
I am currently an Honorary Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Research into Inner Experience at Durham University and an Affiliate Faculty Member in the philosophy of psychiatry and neuroscience at the newly established Experimental American Canadian School of Medicine.
Previously, I was a Ruhr University Alliance Futures Fellow (NYU and Rutgers University) and a postdoctoral researcher at Ruhr University Bochum (DFG research group FOR 2812: Constructing Scenarios of the Past), where I also held Neuromind Fellowship in 2022-23.
I completed my Ph.D. in Neurophilosophy at the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences at LMU Munich in 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Ophelia Deroy (CVBE). My dissertation focused on predictive processing and the interface between consciousness and cognition. Before that, I studied Mind, Language, and Embodied Cognition (M.Sc.) at the University of Edinburgh (with Prof. Andy Clark) and Linguistics and Mathematics (Hons B.Sc.) at the University of Toronto, where I was a laboratory manager and research assistant at the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab in 2015-2017 (Director Prof. John Vervaeke) and a research assistant at Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab in 2016 (Principal Investigator Prof. Ronald Baecker).
Beyond academia, am building a new collaborative research platform that supports dynamic, transparent, and interdisciplinary knowledge creation across the cognitive sciences. My aim is to help reimagine how scientific communities share ideas, develop theories, and publish research.
See my CV to learn more about my past and current projects and “Events” to learn about my upcoming talks. If you are interested in collaboration, philosophical insights for your product or research team, or contributing to the platform, you are welcome to reach out.
Sofiia Rappe 