ABOUT ME
Welcome to my website. I’m a Mexican immigrant in the US living in Terre Haute, IN. I received my B. A. in philosophy and English from Williams College and my Ph. D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. After working in the academy for some time, I transitioned to the AI industry to use my education and skills to have more immediate and profound impacts on human well-being, help build AI that is safe and beneficial, and leverage this transformative technology to unlock human potential. My own experience with AI models has revolutionized my own thinking and approach to philosophy and research, and I am eager to help build a better world by helping build better AI.
Although I am no longer an academic philosopher, I still believe philosophy can help us transform our thinking, our lives, and the world. However, I contend that philosophy’s transformative and liberating potential can only be unlocked when we connect it to the current lived experiences and conditions of people living in a world facing unprecedented crises but also offering unprecedented opportunities. Making this connection requires putting philosophy in conversation with the full spectrum of disciplines, including the sciences, arts, and humanities, but also cuisine, design, and more, with special emphasis on bodies of knowledge that center the experiences/perspectives of marginalized persons.
When we take this kind of philosophical approach, we vividly realize (among other things) that the complex social problems we face today can only be effectively tackled using multidisciplinary frameworks that can help guide, implement, and refine nuanced and intersectoral interventions that jointly intervene on interrelated aspects of our social, economic, legal, political, cultural, and other systems and institutions to bring about large-scale, long-term changes. My approach to philosophy is thus thoroughly multidisciplinary, and I’m always looking for potential collaborators in different disciplines and fields with whom to put ideas in conversation or apply them, especially outside the academy. I’m especially interested in using theoretical tools to craft practical solutions to social problems.
At its best, theorizing can help guide and improve practice, which itself can help enrich and refine our theorizing, leading to upward spirals of mutually supporting theory and practice, and this is the form I aim for my philosophy to take.
I have a deep passion for information visualization and what it can do to unlock insight and understanding.
I'm currently exploring this passion through my multidisciplinary Visualizing Kant Project, which combines philosophy, design, and information visualization to make Kant's philosophical system accessible and exciting to a wider audience.