Daria Zakharova

Daria Zakharova is a PhD candidate in LSE's Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, working with Jonathan Birch and Alexandria Boyle. Daria specialises in philosophy of mind, cognition, and science, with a focus on artificial and non-human animal minds. She taught Mind and Metaphysics and AI and Data ethics and is a co-host of the Conjectures & Refutations seminar series at the LSE Philosophy Department.

She is interested in different kinds of intelligent and cognitive systems that exist in nature and how the current approaches to building AI agents relate to or diverge from biological intelligence(s). In 2024, she was part of a collaborative project between LSE and Google, investigating whether LLMs can make trade-offs involving granular representations of affect states (stipulated pain and pleasure), inspired by the animal sentience paradigm.

She has also written on epistemology of AI in science, specifically how conception of scientific knowledge can accommodate AI-driven scientific practice, and on the interpretations of intelligent behaviour in jumping spiders (together with Jonathan Birch).

Research Interests

• Behavioural and theory-light approaches to the study of artificial minds and consciousness
• Biological and non-biological conceptions of the mind and intelligent behaviour
• Minimal viable mechanisms for embodied, embedded interaction with a complex environment
• Reinforcement Learning
• Artificial Intelligence in scientific practice, scientific knowledge, evidence and simulation