writing
I am currently working on:
A book on moral education based on my PhD thesis
A chapter on ethics for a book on Canada's oil sands
Philosophy
My PhD thesis, From moral sceptic to virtuous agent, was written under the supervision of Prof. Peter Goldie, at U. Manchester. I argue that:
1. There is genuine moral action, and I show that being moral is a matter of having the right emotions
2. One should want to be moral
3. Even when one desires to be moral, one still needs to undergo emotional training
Influences: Hume, Aristotle, economist Robert Frank, primatologist Frans de Waal, evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, political scientist Robert Axelrod.
A rough sketch of my view on what it is to be good was already outlined in my paper: "How to love the bomb: On Solving the Prisoner's Dilemma with Evolutionary Game Theory", in Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and Complexity, edited by Carlos Gershenson, Diederik Aerts and Bruce Edmonds, World Scientific, 2007.
Journalism
I occasionally write opinion articles, mostly on ethical issues. My pieces have been published in the Georgia Straight, The Tyee, Winnipeg Free Press and London Free Press.
In the past, I wrote a weekly column on AI and robotics for a former Portuguese daily newspaper, and computer game reviews for the web site of a major computer game company (under non-disclosure agreement).
Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction
I am working on a number of short stories.
Back in the nineties, I wrote with a friend the dystopian novel "Index" (unpublished). The style bears a family resemblance to that of Boris Vian, Jerome K. Jerome, Douglas Adams and Stephen Heller. I am currently rewriting it. I am aiming for something a bit like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but more upbeat, and with an ending similar to Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, only funnier.
trivia about me and the solar system
At age 15, vocational testing indicated that I should be a carpenter.
Europa, the sixth moon of the planet Jupiter, may have liquid water, but snorkeling may prove difficult, because the water is under a 10km-deep icy crust.
I learned to sail in the lake where Alex the Large throws his droogs, in the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange.
The gravity on the surface of the Sun is just under 30 g. A coin would weigh as much as 30 coins weigh on Earth. If there is ever a human colony on the Sun, everyone will carry nothing but bills.
I like the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall.
I learned to climb in a church in Manchester.
writing