My research agenda sits at the intersection of three fields that are never in dialogue: applied machine learning, comparative religious philosophy, and the ethics of technology as it affects real human communities.
"My work in artificial intelligence led me to question whether consciousness, meaning, and spirituality can be replicated or understood computationally. I approach this question by comparing Western Judeo-Christian frameworks with Eastern philosophies — Daoism, Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism — in their original texts, using Mandarin as both a linguistic tool and a philosophical lens."
What does machine learning reveal about the nature of human consciousness? Current AI architectures encode deeply Western, materialist assumptions about what intelligence and awareness are. My research uses interpretability tools — mechanistic analysis of transformer attention, probing classifiers, activation patching — to examine how models represent concepts like "self," "suffering," "awareness," and "virtue," and how these representations differ across models trained on English versus Mandarin corpora.
The working hypothesis: language models are unintentional philosophical artifacts. The decisions made in their training data, tokenization, and fine-tuning process encode a particular theory of mind — and that theory is Western, rational, and dualist in ways that Eastern philosophical traditions would challenge at the root.
What can Daoist, Confucian, and Chinese Buddhist frameworks offer AI ethics that Western philosophy has not? My research here focuses specifically on three concepts:
Each of these concepts, when applied to current technical challenges in AI — alignment, fairness, privacy — generates novel research directions that the Western philosophical tradition has not explored.
My FinTech research connects directly to my theological interests through a question that sounds economic but is fundamentally moral: what would an honest financial system look like? Bitcoin's fixed supply, its resistance to confiscation, and the Ordinals protocol enabling permanent digital inscription — all of these create new philosophical and ethical territory around concepts like property, stewardship, scarcity, and sovereignty.
Targeting submission to a journal in comparative religion or philosophy of religion.
Long-form academic thesis on AI consciousness categorization through Western vs. Eastern epistemological lenses.
Research capstone submitted as part of SMU Financial Technology certification.
Add links to your GitHub, any published articles, conference pages, or external research repositories below:
Great Books Semantic Engine · Algorithmic Consciousness · NLP experiments
Full-length academic essays available on the blog page