Eugene Yew Siang Chua

I am a Nanyang Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University, where I am working under the Nanyang Assistant Professorship grant. Prior to this, I was Ahmanson postdoctoral instructor in philosophy of science at Caltech. I completed my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California San Diego. During this time, I also spent six months as a predoctoral fellow in the Beyond Spacetime group at the University of Illinois Chicago, a summer as part of the inaugural cohort of Northeastern University’s AI and Data Ethics Summer Training Program, and a summer as a Ph.D. fellow at UCSD’s Institute of Practical Ethics. Prior to my Ph.D., I received both my BA and MA (Cantab) from the University of Cambridge. I also spent a semester at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. My primary research interests lie in the philosophy of physics, centering on the conceptual foundations of thermodynamics and the extent to which thermodynamics can be considered universal. More specifically, my works in this area assess the extent to which classical thermodynamics and its concepts can be extended to the quantum, relativistic, or quantum gravity regimes. In other branches of the philosophy of physics, I have worked on the question of the disappearance (and emergence) of time in quantum gravity, where it is sometimes said that time vanishes at the fundamental level. In the foundations of quantum mechanics, I am currently working on the question of whether we can recover probability and locality in the Everettian or 'many-worlds' (unitary quantum mechanics) framework. My work in the philosophy of physics has recently led me to consider broader questions in the philosophy of science, such as whether idealizations need to be de-idealized in some sense to be justified, and how consilience suitably and concretely understood in the case of thermodynamics can lead to a test of pragmatist reality and operational coherence. Beyond my main research area, I also work on the ethics of AI, with some recent work -- funded by Caltech's Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy -- assessing the ethical risks of applying large language models to the context of outpatient psychiatric healthcare.