User:Hypatia

Bio

Age: 21

Sex: Female

Location: Chicago, IL

Alma Mater: UChicago

Political Views: Libertarian/Anarchocapitalist

Religious Views: Freedom of it, freedom from it

Hello, I'm Parijata Mackey, and I'm having a great time here. Huge fan of seasteading. Fantastic stuff.

I've been lurking around this site for a while, and I hope to start contributing a lot more to it in the months to come.

I'm relatively friendly, so feel free to say hello! And please do call me Jata :-)

Contributions to Seasteading Wiki

None yet :-\

About Me

• Fourth-year at the University of Chicago, where I study philosophy and neuroscience.
• Huge fan of molecular biology, computer science, and weird physics.
• Work in a synthetic biology lab, where I program software and wetware. Proponent of open source and DIY Biology.
• Worked for The Man (DHS, biodefense) for a while. Don't judge me.
• Enjoy teaching, especially lab courses. I'm a fairly easy grader, but I employ public humiliation as a lecture style.
• Libertarian anarchocapitalist, atheist, transhumanist, vegetarian.
• Marginally obsessed with logic and the philosophy of mathematics. Petrified of squirrels.

Research Interests

I hope to be a experimental logician someday, which secretly means I want to work on reverse engineering the brain to create strong AI. I suspect that knowledge of the brain can help elucidate the structure and function of our deductive system.

• To what extent can the products of empirical (neurological) or phenomenological data comment on the philosophy of logic, abstraction, and mathematics?
• What is the link between epistemology and neuroscience?
• How much of our formal logical (e.g. mathematical) understanding employs the same conceptual mechanisms that are used in understanding the ordinary, non-formal domains (e.g. photon processing in the retina and visual cortex)?
• Are the same cognitive mechanisms that we use to characterize everyday ideas also use to characterize formal ideas?
• Exactly what everyday (non-formalized) concepts and cognitive mechanisms are used in exactly what ways in the unconscious conceptualization of technical ideas in abstracted, formalized thought?

And how can we use this information to end Platonism and bring about the Rise of the Machines? ::MUAHAHA::

Things I Like

Favorite Authors (Fiction): F.Dostoevsky, J.R.R.Tolkien, R.Ellison, Homer, H.G.Wells, C.S.Lewis, J.Joyce, E.Bronte, C.Dickens, W.Faulkner, Euripides, W.Shakespeare, M.Twain, Sophocles, W.Whitman, L.Tolstoy, J.Swift

Favorite Authors (Nonfiction): Plato (sigh, that confused man), Aristotle, C.Popper, F.Nietzsche, J.S.Mill, D.Hume, St.Augustine, Voltaire, Avicenna, M.Condorcet, P.d'Holbach, N.Machiavelli, R.Descartes, I.Kant, G.Frege, B.Russell

Favorite Authors (Modern): D.Hofstadter, R.Kurzweil, D.Dennett, E.O.Wilson, J.Pieper, S.Pinker, M.Ridley, J.Diamond, J.Gliek, M.Crichton, R.Dawkins, A.Rand, D.Adams, S.J.Gould, C.Sagan