User:Parijata

"Wikipedia -- proof that there are more pedants than vandals."

Hello, I'm Parijata Mackey, and I'm having a great time here. Although I was around for its inception, I officially joined Wikipedia in 2005. After years reading and lurking, I've started editing more, and creating articles I was dismayed did not already exist. I'm enjoying this; I plan to stay a while.

Articles I've created: Tesla's oscillator, French flag model, DIY biology, Signal averaging, Used bookstore, Statistical dependence, Synfire Chains, Bithorax complex, Biotic stress, Quantum limit, Planck matter, probably others that I've forgotten.

Please contribute to these articles, and help them grow, but vandals be warned -- you hurt them and I kill your family. Unless your edit makes me laugh. Then they escape with their lives. Much love!

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 used 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?

Things I Like
Favorite Authors (Fiction): Dostoevsky, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ralph Ellison, Homer, H. G. Wells, C. S. Lewis, James Joyce, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Euripides, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Sophocles, Walt Whitman, Tolstoy, Johnathan Swift

Favorite Authors (Nonfiction): Plato (although I disagree violently), Aristotle, Karl Popper, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Hume, St. Augustine, Voltaire, Avicenna, Marquis de Condorcet, Baron d'Holbach, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Frege, Bertrand Russell

Favorite Authors (Modern): Douglas Hofstadter, Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Dennett, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Michael Crichton, Leon Kass, Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Douglas Adams, S. J. Gould, Carl Sagan

Non-Scholarly Interests & Hobbies: Reddit, a cappella, coffee shops, DIY bio, cryptanalysis/cryptography, computer security, penetration testing, information security, space medicine, parkour, sports medicine, epidemiology, used bookstores, debates, legal philosophy, civil liberties, coffee, classic rock, Self_reference, and paradox ("This sentence has threee erors.")

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. Matt Cartmill" "Scientists can never resist... and scientists will not resist. When it comes to the ethical questions of artificial intelligence, scientists just don't see red flags. David McAllester" "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Friedrich Nietzsche" "Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand truth, and in his left hand search after truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer: in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request the left hand. Gotthold Lessing"