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God, I hope so. Will someone please reboot?
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?. Nick Bostrom, a transhumanist, poet, philosopher, and Oxford Research Fellow has been generating a lot of interest in the computational underpinnings of reality with his web site to investigate whether we may be living out our lives in a computer simulation. Slashdot and other media have been pointing to his Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, published in Philosophical Quarterly:
ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 'posthuman' stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
A more digestible summary article accompanying this paper, The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High, was recently published in Times Higher Education Supplement. [JML :: Science Fiction]
5:06:19 PM
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A question for educators who do weblogs. For BloggerCon, one of the areas of focus will be weblogs in education. So we've got a couple of people lined up who are scholars who use weblogs with excellence. No announcements yet. Now I want to balance that with a couple of educators who have successfully created weblogs in a school, school district, college, university. I'm looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible. For example, a history class where each student keeps a weblog. Teachers who manage classes with a weblog. My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing? We've already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I want for BloggerCon. [Scripting News]
4:33:11 PM
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© Copyright
2004
Gail Marsella.
Last update:
6/27/2004; 6:52:33 PM.
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