About – Josephius

An eccentric dreamer in search of truth and happiness for all.

General Info

I’m the type of person who can spend a lot of time daydreaming or pondering the meaning of life, the nature of reality, and why people are the way they are. Inevitably, I find reality at times rather unsatisfactory, and feel a determination to create a better world somehow, whether by understanding and changing the real one through scientific research, enterprise, or political discourse; or inventing my own through creative writing or programming simulations like computer games.

The same goes for being unsatisfied with myself. I consider myself a work in progress, and still far from the “gentleman and a scholar” ideal that I try to aspire to. I’m also beholden to the renaissance ideal of the polymath with a breadth of expertise.

Career Info

A few years ago, I became a Master of Computer Science, having been focused on the connections that form our perceptions of reality (neural networks and pattern/object recognition). Having studied cognitive science in undergrad, I’m a connectionist who thinks that mimicking the human brain’s exceptional information processing abilities is, well a no-brainer. The hope is to at least find ways to improve how computers perceive and interact with the real world.

More ambitiously, I aspire to eventually be able to predict the future with neural networks! To that end, I have worked in the past as a data scientist at a startup called Maluuba, and as a research scientist at Huawei Canada. In particular, I have worked on Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and the intersection of the two.

Recently, for complex reasons, I switched industries to do ethical game development under the vision and leadership of a former moral philosophy lecturer at Twin Earth. I was initially a senior programmer, but as needs changed my role shifted to be a writer for the team.

Miscellaneous Personal Info

For hobbies, I like to play the piano and alto saxophone. I’ve also practiced several martial arts (with a strong preference for anything that involves swinging around a sword) as well as martial sports (like fencing). I occasionally do some creative writing, mostly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, and hope to one day write a good novel. Sometimes, in addition to playing them, I design strategy and role-playing games, both digital and board. I also like to consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of quality anime.

I have eclectic tastes, and am equally comfortable reading Scientific American as I am reading, say The Economist, or a D&D Player’s Guide, or a manga like Gunslinger Girl. And, I have a habit of dabbling in amateur philosophy and debating politics, sometimes intentionally playing devil’s advocate in order to see how well thought out people’s beliefs are. Given that my own political view and philosophy are actually rather eclectic and nuanced, I tend to respect, if not necessarily agree with, any well defended argument. I like to follow current events too, and during elections tend to turn into a bit of a political junkie, having actually volunteered on the successful election campaigns of two local Liberal MPs.

I’m going to guess that most of the boring people will have stopped reading by this point and I can write whatever I want here. I sometimes meow at kitty cats when I think no one is looking. I used to want to take over the world when I was in grade school, but have long since realized that right now it really isn’t worth the effort, so I’m concentrating on making it a better place first. That in itself is probably a lifelong endeavour.

Religious Views

I consider myself a liberal Christian agnostic.

I’m a Christian agnostic in the sense that I want to be intellectually honest and admit that I don’t know the truth, but I choose to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith towards Christianity as my preferred religious tradition.

I’m a liberal Christian in the Enlightenment influenced sense that I choose my own reasoned interpretation of scripture rather than just accepting doctrines without scrutiny. I’m particularly partial to emphasizing the “red letter” moral teachings of Jesus.

An unorthodox idea I think makes sense is the notion of purgatorial hell and eventual universal salvation, which I consider more consistent with my understanding of God’s justice and mercy than the traditional view of eternal damnation.

In my humble opinion, the Bible consists of words and letters written by imperfect men who were nonetheless affected by, at the very least, the notion of God, and can serve as a foundation to inform and understand one’s own personal relationship with the divine. To me, the details are less important than the overarching themes.

My views are influenced by certain personal experiences that have defied rational explanation to me, that have led me to believe at least that some form of benevolent god-like entity exists and is active in the universe. This could be the Creator God as understood in classical theism, or perhaps something more science fictiony, like the far distant future time traveller descendents of humanity, advanced aliens, and/or simulators, any of whom would for all intents and purposes be gods to us.

There’s a science fiction story called The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. In some ways it provides a poetic example of how I imagine God could actually come to be. It also explains why scripture describes God as the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last.

Moral Philosophy

Regardless of whether God actually exists, the perspective of an impartial observer of the universe is useful to take to understand what objective universal morality could look like. If God exists, it is my belief that He would, per the various omni-attributes ascribed to Him, actually be able to know and feel our pain and pleasure, and so care about everything that happens to us. Thus, the greatest good, to maximize the happiness of everyone, is, by this logic, God’s Will.

Note that this essentially implies that God would follow a form of Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy I am very much partial to. Specifically, I follow a kind of Eudaimonic Utilitarianism with Kantian Priors that merges classical utilitarianism with deontology and virtue ethics.

To me, the creation and populating of a utopian and eternal heaven is the greatest good possible and the right thing to do, and most probably would be God’s purpose for the universe, and one I think a truly rational person should align with. I detail more of this personal philosophy in my essay Innate Truths, which is my attempt to answer the question of the meaning of life.

Given my philosophical inclinations, I’m partial to the ideals of the Effective Altruism social movement (despite it being rather secular), and have been loosely involved in the EA community since 2013.

Political Philosophy

My philosophical beliefs have a significant influence on what I stand for when it comes to politics. To me, the right thing to do is to maximize the happiness of everyone. I believe that the best way to achieve this is through a kind of liberal democratic socialism (possibly of the kind that Mill and Rawls espoused), and I see value in both the liberal and socialist intellectual traditions as dual heirs to the Enlightenment emphasis on equality, reason, and progress.

Liberal democracy ensures that the decisions made by the government have the consent of the governed through popular sovereignty. As a decision procedure, voting is effective because false views tend to be widely different and cancel out, while the truth tends to agree with itself. Different human experiences will inevitably lead to different viewpoints, but the underlying truths will correspond to reality and form the majority opinion, more often than not, on average. This is the wisdom of crowds effect, and it is why democracy works. Nonetheless, this should be combined with constitutional rights that protect individuals from the majority overreaching.

Democratic socialism involves a system where the means of production are held democratically by the public rather than private capital interests. In practice there are many ways to construct such a socialist economy, ranging from entirely decentralized markets of cooperatives, to varying degrees of central planning (possibly augmented by modern AI technology), and any realistic system will probably incorporate elements of both the market and planning (i.e. market socialism). The point is for a system that operates in the interests of the greatest common good, rather than for the profit of private property owners who for the most part can ultimately trace their historical roots to unjust military conquests.

I’d also settle for something like a universal basic income within a mixed market economy with both public and private sectors as a potentially more practical and politically feasible solution to the problem. In practice, rather than splitting hairs over ideological purity, I generally support leftward, progressive politics.

Cultural Identity

I was born in Canada, and am a proud Canadian citizen who believes in the values espoused in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I’m also of Chinese ethnicity (parents are from Taiwan, paternal grandparents from China) and respect my cultural heritage and its long and splendid history. I tend to take an internationalist, cosmopolitan view of what humanity is capable of, and prefer not to take sides but try to find the nuances and complexities that allow for agreement and understanding.