About

Dawson Preethi

I am a structural engineer, author, and independent researcher whose interests move across engineering, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, philosophy, science, and literature.

My professional life has been largely shaped by structural and marine engineering. But alongside engineering, I have maintained a long engagement with questions that engineering alone cannot answer: How does language produce meaning? What constitutes a subject? What are the limits of knowledge? What happens to authorship when machines begin to write? And what can apparently distant fields reveal when their structures are examined together?

Much of my recent work develops around the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis, artificial intelligence, philosophy of language, and the foundations of physics. I am particularly interested in incompleteness—not simply as a failure of knowledge, but as something that may be constitutive of subjectivity, meaning and intelligence itself.

This inquiry has led to books including Left-AI: Against the Fantasy of Complete Intelligence and The Return of the Dead Author, alongside my literary works The Basis and Thirty Orbits Later.

I also produce Sinhala-language video essays exploring difficult theoretical questions without reducing them to motivational slogans or simplified “facts.” My current series, අර්ථයේ ජ්‍යාමිතිය — The Geometry of Meaning, investigates language, meaning, subjectivity, the unconscious and artificial intelligence.

This blog, වචන ටැක්සි, began long before these current projects. Rather than abandoning that history, I now see it as an archive of an intellectual trajectory—older writings, literary experiments, arguments and changing interests existing alongside my present work.

The purpose of this site, therefore, is not to represent a single discipline.

It is a place where engineering can encounter philosophy, Lacan can encounter AI, physics can disturb our assumptions about completeness, and literature can ask questions that theory cannot formulate in the same way.

Some of the positions expressed in older writings may no longer represent exactly what I think today. I prefer to preserve that difference rather than retrospectively rewrite it. An intellectual archive should contain not only conclusions, but also changes of direction.

Dawson Preethi
Engineer · Author · Independent Researcher