Welcome to my page.
Thank you for visiting my website! I’m a lot of things, but one of the things that I am is a PhD candidate in Philosophy. This digital garden serves as a repository for my learning in computation, complex systems, and philosophy. The site is designed to be fast, text-focused, distraction free, and easy to read. Notes can be searched, browsed by recency, or explored by topic. The writing here is often a memento of a topic, an exploratory thoughts, or reflect fragments of ongoing research, while longer form nonacademic writing on related topics will be available on my main site. I plan to publish notes as I study to provide myself and anyone interested a permanently accessible archive of the topics I cover along the way. I will always strive for accuracy in producing these notes. Since they are learning-oriented, they may not be expertly analyzed and will transform the content from existing articles or textbooks, which I will always credit and mention. Be sure to consult those.
Background
I began my academic career in classical philology with a view to reading the Greek philosophers. I eventually made my way to philosophy where I studied Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Plato. I decided to accept the admissions offer of a PhD in Philosophy in order to take a different tack, namely, to use the opportunity to study artificial intelligence, brains, and cognitive science, more generally. Acquiring these skills was challenging as a philosopher, but I now have decent competency in those areas and do research wholly oriented towards computational and theoretical approaches to understanding complex phenomena. Along the way I developed an interest in computational social science as well.
Why publish these notes
I took a long retreat from any online presence and any attempt to publish any work publicly for several years starting in 2019 or so. I noticed that academic publishing encourages a philosopher to write work that simply isn’t important and that the odds of producing something aere perennius were almost zero in the first place. Writing in and of itself isn’t very difficult. It’s the thinking that counts. I thought that perhaps I should study enough that I can think and say something worth communicating. Although I have reasonably extensive notes in other forms, some of the books that I read or things that occurred to me during that period time are probably forever lost. I will never touch Greek or Roman texts and countless others with the same intensity that I did before. Some of the topics I covered in my early in my academic career I may never cover again. This archive is intended to capture what happens from here forward so that a record is maintained.
A request
I enjoy sharing my ideas openly and freely. I would hope to create the atmosphere of a friendly and engaging graduate seminar. Because the Notes component is a static site, the most I could ever see is that someone visited the site. If you find something valuable or useful, I’d genuinely appreciate a simple acknowledgment or nudge in any form. Let’s connect—reach out, follow me, or join the conversation on the main site.
Research methodologies
My research largely consists of the use of computational methods in order to study and solve problems over complex systems. Though ‘complex systems’ often denotes a network approach, I explore methods that bypass explicit network structures if doing so is useful. One of my PhD advisors in particular has instilled in me model and method selection sensitive to the structure of the problem. I would Each of the last three years has been oriented toward a different project. In order of most recent to least: a paper modeling influence maximization in content-driven social networks, a paper on a decision theoretic approach to valuative takings, and a paper arguing for a bottom up, network approach to schizophrenia.
Research
My research largely focuses on computational and theoretical approaches to understanding complex phenomena. Although each year tends to have a different focus, my projects have included:
- Modeling influence maximization in content-driven social networks
- A decision-theoretic approach to valuative interpretation
- A bottom-up, network-based approach to understanding complex mental phenomena
Future explorations
My current interests include, but aren’t limited to:
- Advanced modeling of transformer-based AI architectures
- Biology-inspired cognitive architectures
- Computational modeling of geopolitics and social systems
- Philosophical foundations of complexity science
Closing out
Thanks again for visiting my site! Note that the site was built using a customized implementation of Quartz 4, whose existence greatly sped up development of the site. All the modifications I made can be found in the GitHub repository for the project. If you have any questions or want to connect, please do! I can be reached at dikaiosvne@gmail.com or you can go follow me using the social links I included in the page’s header.