I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in Eleazar Eskin's lab at UCLA. I am working on understanding the genetic structure of living systems using formal tools of causal inference. On the more theoretical front, I am trying to understand the interplay between deductive and inductive causal reasoning.

Here's a short description of my research. Here's another one.

My Erdos number is 4 (Paul Erdos to Noga Alon to Simon Kasif to Judea Pearl to me).

Synchronicity-bearing anagrams of my name: airiest sylph, lisp hysteria, hairless pity, sears pithily.

I am very interested in insights into the 'Trilemma of Consciousness,' namely that either dualism is true, panpsychism is true, or consciousness does not exist, although it seems like it does (a view which for lack of a better word I call ``Dennettism''). All three outcomes are extremely unintuitive to a modern western mind.

8/18/07: Maybe quantum mechanics is weird because it is a theory of interactions between natural law and free will, but it is misinterpreted as a purely physical theory. Perhaps all apparent randomness in the Universe is due to 'conscious choices.' Entropy increases because choices pile up. Of course this implies both theism and dualism.

9/24/07: ABD.

11/29/07. Niels Bohr said: "The opposite of a great truth is also true." My mathematical interpreration of this is that what makes a proposition great is the importance of its truth value, regardless of what that truth value is. "Great truths" in mathematics are things like the Continuum Hypothesis or the Axiom of Choice. They are doorways between worlds, and choosing their truth value is choosing which door to open and which world to enter.

3/12/08. E finita la commedia.

4/14/08. Wikipedia is McDonaldization of knowledge.

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