Hi, I'm
Manoj Dhakal / मनोज ढकाल

I recently graduated (May 2026) from NYU Abu Dhabi, double majoring in Philosophy & Computer Science, and with a minor in Applied Mathematics. For the next year, I am pursuing a research fellowship at NYUAD in Philosophy under the supervision of Professor Owen Flanagan.

I like to write both bounded prose, and unbounded work [prose and poetry]. Under bounded work, I do some philosophical takes and turns on whatever interests me, with however much nuance I can muster. Under unbounded work, I occasionally roll up my creative sleeves to write a short story or a poem. I hope to have the courage to write a novel some day, but none of my attempts at writing one have borne fruition until now. Sometimes, I have sudden fits of journal-style writing, and when I do, I usually post it in my substack profile. I also run a YouTube channel under the name epistemic spaghetti.

My current interests are in Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and Philosophy of AI. My capstone submission for philosophy was titled Belief as Pattern: Best-System Interpretationism under Prof Kevin Coffey. It dealt with exploring various theories of belief (Representationalism, Dispositionalism, Interpretationism), and offering my own positive account based on the Best-System framework, famously used to systematize the “laws of nature”. On the Computer Science end, I have worked with Prof Keith Ross in the field of mechanistic interpretability, trying to decode how large language models produce seemingly-magical output, focusing specifically on counting tasks.

Get in touch!