For Jorge Morales, Questions Come First

Questions tend to come first for Jorge Morales.  

How does the brain turn information from the outside world into an experience? Why are we sometimes looking directly at something without consciously seeing it? How do we know what we know — and recognize when we don’t? 

Although his degrees are in philosophy, Morales has been an interdisciplinary researcher for most of his life. Refusing to draw a line between disciplines, he has followed those questions across philosophy, psychology and neuroscience on a quest to understand one of the biggest puzzles there is: how the mind works.  

Joining the Department of Philosophy as an associate professor, with affiliations in Psychology and Neuroscience, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Morales sees Duke as a place where those connections can flourish. It’s also a place he has known for nearly a decade.  

Morales first came to campus in 2018, fresh from his Ph.D., to attend the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP). He’s returned many times since, drawn back to the annual two-week program, organized by Felipe De Brigard and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, that brings brain science and philosophy into the same classroom: Philosophers study neuroscience, while neuroscientists tackle philosophy.  

“I’ve noticed that many institutions pay lip service to interdisciplinarity, while some actually do support collaborative research,” he says. “Duke is definitely in the latter category.”

At Duke, he will continue his cross-disciplinary work in his Subjectivity Lab, which studies how the mind moves from encountering the world through the senses, to representing, experiencing and thinking about it.  

That broad question — how information becomes experience — gives the lab’s research a common thread. Morales and his collaborators work with children, neurotypical adults and patients with disorders of consciousness, using behavioral and vision experiments, mental-imagery and metacognition tasks, eye movements, pupil responses and fMRI. The goal is to understand not just what the brain processes, but how that processing becomes something we experience. 

Consider a traffic light and a driver who fails to register it. 

“When you're driving and approach a red light, sometimes you see it and stop, but other times, you might just blow through the light,” Morales explains. “The photons hitting your retina are identical in those two scenarios, so why the different outcomes?”  

That question leads directly into the lab’s work on consciousness and on metacognition, our ability to reflect on what we know, what we don’t know and the decisions we make. The latter has implications for everything from how students prepare for exams to how people evaluate information and navigate misinformation. 

The same questions can also be traced across the lifespan. With children, Morales studies how mental imagery develops and how imagination interacts with our ability to distinguish reality from fiction. Through collaborations with patients with disorders of consciousness, he asks the opposite question: How can we determine what someone can perceive, understand or remember when they cannot tell us themselves? 

More recently, the lab has begun exploring related questions with large language models (LLMs), as Morales considers what these systems might reveal about intelligence, representation and consciousness. For Morales, these aren’t separate curiosities. They’re pieces of the same larger puzzle. 

“The way I see it is there are fundamental questions about the human mind,” he says, “and we want to know how that works.” 

And at Duke, Morales has found a place where he doesn’t have to choose between the questions of philosophy and the tools of science. 

“I was told many times in my career that this was not possible,” he says, “At Duke, I’ve been given a way to make it happen.”