Before there was a website, there were questions.
Questions about memory. About identity. About why music can communicate something language cannot. About whether literature reveals something fundamental about the mind, or merely describes it. About whether consciousness is a biological process, a philosophical problem, or simply another story we tell ourselves.
Everything collected here — essays, poems, research notebooks, projects, and reading notes — is an attempt to approach those questions from different directions. This archive is less a record of achievements than a record of inquiry.
Why Homer
My earliest sustained intellectual fascination was not with ancient history but with the way Homer seemed to describe a mind unlike our own.
The Iliad is often introduced as a poem about war, heroism, and fate. What remained with me instead was the architecture of thought it presents. Homeric psychology describes human experience not through a single unified self but through interacting faculties — the thymos, menos, phrenes, and noos — whose relationships often appear distributed across the individual, the gods, and the surrounding social order.
That observation became the beginning of a much larger question: if different cultures have imagined different models of the mind, how many assumptions about our own psychology are historically contingent rather than universal?
Why Deleuze
While reading philosophy, I discovered the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
What attracted me was not their reputation for difficulty but their willingness to reject the assumption that identity is fundamentally unified. Schizoanalysis offered a language for multiplicity, becoming, and distributed subjectivity that unexpectedly resonated with Homeric psychology.
My essay on Homeric Psychology and Schizoanalysis began as an attempt to test whether these two seemingly distant intellectual traditions could illuminate one another. It was less an exercise in literary criticism than an experiment in conceptual synthesis.
That process taught me that some of the most interesting questions emerge precisely where disciplinary boundaries begin to dissolve.
Why neuroscience
Those philosophical questions eventually led toward neuroscience.
I wanted to understand not only how memory feels but how it is physically instantiated. If memories are patterns of neural activity and synaptic change, how does a biological process become something as personal as identity?
My current reading reflects this transition. Alongside philosophy and literature, I study anatomy, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioural science, working through texts such as Gray's Anatomy, Robert Sapolsky's work on behaviour and neuroscience, and introductory computational methods using Python.
Neuroscience provides mechanisms.
Philosophy provides interpretation.
I have never found either satisfying without the other.
Why literature
Literature remains indispensable because it asks questions science cannot easily formalise.
Dostoevsky explores consciousness through contradiction. Oscar Wilde examines performance and identity through wit. Dickens investigates society as a psychological force. Fitzgerald writes about memory, longing, and idealisation. Anne Rice and Alexandre Dumas approach transformation and morality through entirely different traditions.
These writers are not simply subjects of admiration. They are alternative methods of studying human nature.
Why poetry
I began writing poetry years before I imagined writing research essays.
The poems often return to the same themes that appear elsewhere in this archive: memory, mortality, identity, longing, and the passage of time. Formal metre interests me because constraint frequently produces greater precision of thought rather than limiting it.
An essay attempts to persuade.
A poem attempts to preserve.
Both are forms of inquiry.
Why music
Music has accompanied my intellectual life almost as long as books.
I have studied keyboard for many years, read sheet music, and recently begun learning the electric guitar. My listening ranges from Mozart and Chopin to Nirvana, though I return most often to Dmitri Shostakovich.
What interests me is not simply musical beauty but musical cognition.
How does organised sound communicate grief, tension, or memory without language? How can structure alone evoke emotional experiences that seem universally recognisable? These questions have begun shaping both my independent reading and my proposed research on music creation, motivation, and cognition.
Why languages
Languages are another way of understanding how people organise thought.
Alongside English, I have independently studied French and Latin while formally learning Mandarin Chinese. Each language offers not merely a different vocabulary but a different intellectual tradition, allowing texts and ideas to be encountered closer to their original context. Learning languages continually reminds me that translation is never only linguistic; it is also philosophical.
Why programming
More recently, I have begun learning Python.
Programming represents another language entirely: one that allows questions about cognition to become models, simulations, and experiments. My long-term interests increasingly lie where computation, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy intersect. The goal is not simply to analyse ideas but eventually to test some of them.
Why teaching
One of the most meaningful experiences so far has been teaching music theory to children recovering from trafficking during my internship at Marici.
Designing a structured twenty-two-lesson course reminded me that knowledge only becomes meaningful when it can be communicated. Teaching transformed music from something I studied into something I could share, and reinforced my growing interest in learning itself as a cognitive process.
One thread, not many
From a distance, this archive appears to contain many unrelated interests:
Homer. Deleuze. Neuroscience. Music. Poetry. Programming. Languages. Literature.
Closer inspection reveals the opposite.
Each represents a different method of approaching the same enduring questions:
- — How does memory shape identity?
- — What constitutes a self?
- — How do biology, language, and culture together produce experience?
- — Why do music and literature sometimes describe consciousness more convincingly than explanation alone?
- — How should philosophy and science inform one another?
This website exists because I have found it more honest to keep these conversations together than to separate them into academic disciplines.
I do not expect the questions to disappear. I hope only that, over time, they become better questions.
This archive documents not what I know, but what I am trying to understand.