Faculty Profile: Dan Lloyd

Dan Lloyd
Brownell Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus
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Trinity College faculty member since 1987

Degrees:

Ph.D., Columbia Univ.
M.A., Columbia Univ.
B.A., Oberlin College

During his 35 years at Trinity, Professor Dan Lloyd innovated relentlessly in both his teaching and research. As a scholar, he has sought to understand consciousness as it arises in the human brain, leading to his joint participation in both the philosophy department and the neuroscience program. His flagship course, “Minds and Brains,” has been a rite of passage for generations of neuroscience and philosophy students. (The “Minds” part of Minds and Brains became an online course, “The Conscious Mind: A philosophical road trip,” offered repeatedly on the EdX platform, eventually reaching 20,000 students around the world. The archived course, including videos, exercises, and discussions, can be found at https://www.edx.org/course/the-conscious-mind-a-philosophical-road-trip-2 (although you may need a (free) EdX account to see it).) Other courses explored music and the brain, philosophy of mind in various traditions, and (more recently) Shakespeare (as philosopher).

Professor Lloyd was one of the original founders of the Trinity Neuroscience Program in 1990, and served as its first director. About then he and several colleagues also launched New Faculty Orientation, which has initiated new colleagues to the college ever since. Also in the early 90s, he named and cofounded the Community Learning Initiative, and directed CLI for its first decade, during which Trinity faculty developed more than 200 community learning courses. In the early 2000s, he directed Trinity’s experimental sophomore learning community, Tutorial College. At Trinity, he won the Arthur Hughes Award for teaching by a junior faculty member, The Trustee Award for outstanding service to the college, and the Thomas C. Brownell Award for excellence in teaching.

He is the author of Simple Minds (MIT Press 1989) and Radiant Cool: A novel theory of consciousness (MIT Press 2004). The latter, a theory of consciousness presented as noir detective fiction, won the ForeWord Magazine “Book of the Year” Gold Medal Award in 2004. With several Trinity colleagues, he co-edited Minds, Brains, and Computers: Perspectives in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (Ablex Publishers, 1992). More recently, he co-edited and extensively co-wrote Subjective Time: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality (MIT Press 2014). He is also the author of more than 60 published articles, ranging from short stories to scientific studies appearing in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, and others. His work earned him the first “New Perspectives in fMRI Research” Award, along with Fulbright and ACLS scholarships. Two research talks are readily viewable online: “This is your brain as music”, and “The Music of Thought”.

His efforts to make complex systems understandable resulted in work in visualization and sonification (the presentation of data as sound), leading to installations, lectures, and performances in galleries and museums around the world. Some animations and videos from this work can be seen on his vimeo channel, and on YouTube.

Professor Lloyd’s hobbies include woodworking, experimental music, video art, and photography – for some examples, see https://www.instagram.com/instagranlloyd/.

curriculum vitae