Welcome.
(artwork by Daisy Latta)
The philosophy you will find here:
The world is most prepossessing when viewed as a work of art, science, and beauty.
We are all capable of extraordinary feats and extraordinary good.
On writing.
The central core of the human experience is the power of story. As storytelling animals, literature, poetry, and metaphor are as fundamental as the biological processes that keep up alive. As a writer, I am particularly intrigued by those books that cast reality in shades of gray (primarily surrealism and magical realism). Like mathematics gives us the tools necessary to understand the world, I believe that literature gives the mind the wings it needs to achieve its ambitions.
On cognitive science.
My interest in cognitive science grew organically out of a love of art. Language was the great love of my life, and a degree in linguistics soon followed, which continued to expand until I was looking at the whole of human thinking: Memory, learning, intelligence, creativity. This last node, creativity, I am most passionate about discovering in machines. If the human is a storytelling animal, can a machine, too, live in a world of narrative?
