Email: zachary.thornton@okstate.edu
Pronouns: He/him/his
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. Previously, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech. I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
My philosophical research is in metaphysics, value theory, and the philosophy of language on issues related to identity and distinctness. My paper "The Identity of Necessary Indiscernibles" develops and defends novel general metaphysical explanations of identity and distinctness facts. It is forthcoming in Philosophers' Imprint. In other work, I explore issues related to identity, such as what makes survival distinctively and first-personally valuable (see "What Matters in Personal Transformations") and issues that arise due to differences between the granularity of our representations of the world and the granularity of the world itself (see "What Counts in Counting").
I also research AI alignment and safety, especially alignment interventions in pretraining informed by the Persona Selection Model of AI cognition. My manuscript "The Promise of Self-Fulfilling Alignment" details proposals and challenges for pretraining alignment, including a novel proposal. I'm presently working with AI researchers at dlab @ EPFL in Switzerland building normatively aligned base models using their synthetic persona pretraining technique.
I draw on the insights from feminist philosophy, critical theory, and non-Western philosophy in my work. In non-Western philosophy, I have special interest in the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi and two schools of Hindu philosophy: Sāṃkhya and Vaiśeṣika. My future research includes projects that directly focus on these areas.
I believe games can be fun and pedagogically rich teaching tools that also help create an inclusive classroom, especially for neurodivergent students (https://stimpunks.org/gaming/). To promote the use of games in philosophical pedagogy, I have created a list of games for teaching philosophy.