I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (LSE), working under the supervision of Jonathan Birch and Alexandria Boyle. I specialize in philosophy of mind, cognition, and science, with a focus on artificial and non-human animal minds. I also taught AI and Data Ethics, and Mind and Metaphysics at the LSE Philosophy Department.

 

I am interested in the 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).

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In 2024, I was part of a collaborative research project between LSE and Google, investigating whether LLMs can make trade-offs involving granular representations of affect states (stipulated pain and pleasure), inspired by a paradigm from the animal sentience literature.

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In 2025, I collaborated with Marta Halina and Martyna Stachaczyk at the HPS Cambridge, investigating the evolutionary and developmental origin processes enabling biological organisms to successfully exploit causal structures of their environments. We argue that current leading approaches to causal learning in humans, animals and AI lack an explanation of and agent's ability to experience themselves as causally embedded in complex, noisy environments, and instead begin with the agent already capable of instrumental causal interaction with the world to further explain causal learning abilities. This collaboration established a promising basis for future empirical work on agency in RL.

 

I’ve also written on epistemology of AI in science, specifically about how our conception of scientific knowledge can plausibly accommodate AI-driven scientific practice, and investigated competing explanations of intelligent behavior in jumping spiders, suggesting broader implications for debates in comparative cognition.

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Please visit my Research page for more information on my past and current research. 

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You can find my resume here: CV

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Email: d.zakharova1 [at] lse ac uk

Bluesky: @dzakharova.bsky.social