Dawson Preethi | වචන ටැක්සි

Across philosophy, physics, and the human sciences, ideas often appear to belong to separate worlds. Psychoanalysis speaks the language of desire and lack; quantum physics deals with particles, fields, and equations; artificial intelligence concerns optimization, probability, and learning. Yet beneath these differences, certain structures repeat. Surely, this doesnt fall on the category of Sokalian.   A homology is not a metaphor and not a loose analogy or a statistical relationship. It is a shared formal logic appearing in different domains, even when the surface vocabulary changes. Homologies do not claim that one domain causes the other, nor that they are secretly “the same thing.” Or correlated. They claim something more modest—and more radical: that different systems are constrained by the same structural limits. My broader project identifies eight such homologies linking Lacanian psychoanalysis, quantum physics, and their potential impact into artificial intelligence. Thi...

  What If Nirvana Is Neither Enlightenment Nor Psychosis? For more than two thousand years, Buddhism has spoken about Nirvana as the end of suffering. For more than one hundred years, psychoanalysis has spoken about desire as something that can never be fully satisfied. At first glance, the two traditions seem destined to disagree. Buddhism appears to promise liberation from craving. Lacanian psychoanalysis insists that desire is woven into the very structure of human subjectivity. One tradition seeks freedom from attachment. The other warns that every attempt to escape desire may simply become another form of desire. But what if the disagreement is not as simple as it appears? What if Nirvana is neither a mystical union nor a psychological breakdown? What if it points toward a form of subjectivity that even Lacanian psychoanalysis struggles to describe? These questions led me to an unusual experiment. Rather than comparing Buddhism and psychoanalysis at the level of doctrines and ...

Many friends in Sri Lanka who are interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, political thought, and contemporary culture have asked me what exactly The Return of the Dead Author contains and who might benefit from reading it. Although the book begins with artificial intelligence, it is not primarily a book about technology. It is a book about language, subjectivity, desire, authorship, and the strange structures that organize human existence. For readers from the humanities, the book offers an extensive journey through Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and contemporary debates surrounding AI and culture. Particular attention is given to Lacan's major conceptual frameworks, including the Mirror Stage, the Symbolic Order, the Graph of Desire, the Four Discourses, the Borromean Knot, the Sinthome, and the major Clinical Structures of Neurosis, Perversion, and Psychosis. Rather than presenting these concepts as abstract theory, the book develops them systematic...

After many months of writing, revising, researching, diagramming, and rethinking, I am pleased to announce that my new book, The Return of the Dead Author: AI Writing, Language Models, and the Fourth Humiliation of Mankind , is now available on Amazon. This book began with a question that initially appeared simple but gradually became impossible to ignore: Who—or what—has ever been the true author of language? The emergence of artificial intelligence has revived a debate that philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory have been wrestling with for generations. As large language models produce essays, stories, poems, arguments, and conversations with remarkable fluency, many people assume we are confronting an entirely new problem. My suspicion was different. What if AI is not creating a new problem at all? What if it is exposing a question that has always been there, hidden beneath our assumptions about creativity, originality, consciousness, and authorship? Drawing on information ...

When I walked into Dennis Perera's Neranjana , I expected to watch a controversial play about a man who falls in love with a goat. By the time the curtain fell, I realized that this was not the play I had actually seen. The goat, although central to the story, was never its true subject. Rather, the play gradually revealed itself as an exploration of a far more disturbing question: why does any object come to occupy the centre of human desire? Whether that object is another person, wealth, professional success, religion, political power, or, in this case, a goat, the underlying structure appears remarkably similar. It is precisely this structure that Jacques Lacan devoted much of his teaching to investigating. One detail immediately caught my attention. The protagonist's psychological disturbance does not begin after he falls in love with the goat. Long before the audience learns of the affair, something has already begun to fracture. He forgets words, loses concentration, hes...

තානාපතිවරු සහ අන්ධ බිංදුව [සරසවි බැල්ම සහ ක්වොන්ටම් බැල්ම] මාතෘකාව ගැන ඉස්සෙල්ලම යමක් කියන්න ඕන. නැත්නම් ලිපියේ අන්තර්ගතය මේ මාතෘකාවට කිසිම සේවයක් කර නොමැති බැව් කාට හෝ හිතෙන්නට පුළුවන් බැවිනි. තානාපතිවරු සහ අන්ධ බිංදුව යැයි එකට හමු වන්නට සළස්වා ඇති කිසිදු සම්බන්ධයක් මතුපිටින් නොමැති සංකල්ප දෙක එකට සම්බන්ධ කිරීමට මගේ උත්සාහය පිළිබඳ ඇඟවුමක් ලෙස මෙලෙස මාතෘකාව තෝරා ඇත. "තානාපතිවරු" නම් හෑන්ස් හෝල්බින්ගේ The Ambassadors (1533) නමින් වූ ලෝ ප්‍රකට සිතුවමයි. අන්ධ බිංදුව නම් ඇසේ දෘශ්ටිවිතානය මත පිහිටි රූප සංඥා මොළයට සම්බන්ධ කරන ස්නායු රැහැන් ඇරඹුම් ලක්ෂ්‍යය යි. එතැන ඇති සුවිශේෂත්වය නම් එම කුඩා පෙදෙසෙන් ඇසට පෙනීම නමැති සංවේදනය ඇති නොකිරීමයි. එනම් වචනයේ පරිසමාප්ත අර්ථයෙන් එම කුඩා පෙදෙස ඇස තුළ ඇති අන්ධ පෙදෙසක් වීමයි. හෑන්ස් හෝල්බින්ගේ ලෝ ප්‍රකට තානාපතිවරු සිතුවමේ ඇති හිස් කබලේ විරූපිතය [ANAMORPHOSIS] සිතුවම දෙස සාමාන්‍ය ලෙස බැලූ විට නොපෙනී යන දෘශ්‍ය වස්තුවකි. අප සාමාන්‍ය යෙන් සිතුවමක් දෙස බලන්නේ එයට අභිලම්බකව ඇති දෘශ්‍ය රේඛාවක ඇස තබා බැව් අප ඉතා හොඳින් දන්නා කාරණයකි. එබඳු දෘශ්‍ය...

  I have published the first episode of a new Sinhala series investigating the origins of human cognition from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology, philosophy, AI, and psychoanalysis. One of the central ideas discussed is that knowledge does not necessarily require language . Evolution accumulated successful behavioural solutions over millions of years and embodied them within DNA. Instincts are not merely behaviours; they represent information preserved through natural selection, allowing organisms to respond adaptively without explicit reasoning or symbolic communication. This provides an interesting analogy with modern Large Language Models. While the mechanisms are fundamentally different, both DNA and LLMs embody information acquired through extensive interaction with their respective environments. One preserves biological adaptations across generations; the other preserves statistical patterns extracted from language. Neither relies on conscious understanding, yet ...

 I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest book: 52 Weeks of Cinema: A Lacanian Viewing Companion The project explores cinema through the lens of psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan and later ideological readings associated with thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek. Rather than functioning as a traditional film guide, the book is structured as a 52-week reflective practice combining: • film viewing • psychoanalytic concepts • philosophical interpretation • guided reflection The aim is to help readers engage with cinema beyond narrative and entertainment — as a structure of desire, fantasy, ideology, and perception. This interdisciplinary work brings together my long-standing interests in philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and cinematic interpretation. Available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H1QQC1V7

Two social phenomena have become increasingly visible in contemporary Sri Lankan social media. The first is the proliferation of channels presenting Buddhism alongside quantum mechanics, string theory, holographic universes, multidimensional realities, consciousness studies, and various scientific concepts. These presentations often suggest that hidden correspondences exist between ancient Buddhist teachings and the deepest secrets of modern physics.  The second phenomenon is the spread of narratives surrounding curses, karma, destiny, and political retribution. Following the social upheavals of 2022, many people observed that some individuals who publicly cursed politicians later died before those they had condemned. These deaths, although often explainable through ordinary causes, became incorporated into stories of cosmic justice, karmic revenge, or supernatural return. At first glance, these appear to be unrelated developments. One belongs to the realm of pseudo-scientific info...