Posts Under Mind Child’s Musings Category
ALT! Who goes there? – Part 5 – An essay by Extropia DaSilva
Now Extropia DaSilva has her own blog! This essay is republished with kind permission of Extie — Gwyn Remember that moment in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, when the bears are heading for home while Goldilocks is sleeping in baby bear’s bed? Small children find her behaviour rather strange, and an experiment involving a tube of sweets can help explain why. In this experiment, a child is offered a tube…
ALT! Who Goes There? – Part 4 – by Extropia DaSilva
THINGS WE THINK WITH. Try this exercise. Stop reading for a minute and take a look at the objects around you. Think about how they influence your life and your thinking. In the previous essay, we concentrated mostly on how other people play a part in shaping one’s developing personality. But humans are not just social animals, they are also prolific toolmakers. The cultural artefacts we have created enter into…
ALT! Who Goes There? Part Three by Extropia DaSilva
In the previous essay, we saw how philosophy embarked on a failed quest to find the core self. Something else that has occupied philosophers’ minds through the ages is the nature of reality. What is it, in and of itself? Are we in a position to know? In concepts and thought experiments like ‘the veil of Maya’, ‘Plato’s Cave’, ‘Descartes’ evil deceiver’ and ‘Nozik’s Experience Machine’, we are invited to…
Alt! Who Goes There? (Part 2) An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
TWO: THE BIRTH OF THE SOUL AND THE DEATH OF THE SELF. In philosophy, investigations into the nature of self-consciousness can be divided into two main theories. ‘Theories of self’ attempt to determine what kind of thing the self is, or attempt to show that it is not a ‘thing’ at all. ‘Theories of personal identity’ are primarily concerned with personal identity over time. In other words, they set out…
Alt! Who Goes There? An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
ONE: DOLLS AND ACTIVES. In ‘Virals And Definitives In SL’ and other essays, I discussed the concept of the ‘Pairson’: A character in an online world that is controlled by two or more people in RL. This lead to various questions, not least of which was ‘to what extent does the character remain the same, if the person behind it has changed’? A more common challenge to personal identity is…
Fake Avatars and the Duplicates Paradox: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
In ‘A Tale Of Two Avatars’, Wagner James Au reports on the discovery that there are two ‘Hamlet Aus’ on the social networking site ‘Avatars United’. Like many things to do with life on the screen, a superficial consideration of this discovery leads to a clear-cut and simple conclusion: There is the real Hamlet Au, and then there is a fake Hamlet Au. However, again like so many things to…
Digital People and Anonymous Avatars by Extropia DaSilva
This time, we get a short essay from Extropia DaSilva… but one that is quite close to my heart Enjoy! — Gwyn “Trussssst in me/ Jusssst in me”- Ka from Disney’s ‘Jungle Book’. When H+ Magazine published Stephen Cobb’s article ‘Real Discrimination Against Digital People’, someone wrote the following response: ‘I fully respect online personas, but expecting me to implicitly trust anonymous avatars is pushing it’. Many people seem to…
It’s Alive: The Theory and Consequences of Technological Evolution by Extropia DaSilva
Four years after Darwin published ‘On The Origin Of Species’, Samuel Butler was calling for a theory of evolution for machines. Most attempts at such a theory have tried to frame it in terms of the steady accumulation of changes, recognisable as Darwinian. But natural selection has certain limitations. For one thing, a new species can only be created through incremental steps. What is more, each step must result in…
The Russian Dolls: A Short Science Fiction Story by Extropia DaSilva
Extie is back, and this time she wrote not an essay, but a short story — Gwyn This story was originally written for my sis, Jamie Marlin, to celebrate our aniversary. ONE. The television set materialised out of thin air, neatly filling the space that Adam had been staring at the moment before. He sat on the edge of his bed which doubled as his sofa when he did not…
Ray Kurzweil and the Conquering of Mount Improbable: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
I’m afraid I’m too busy right now to manage to write anything decent; thankfully, Extie has finished one of her essays, which I truly hope you’ll enjoy reading! – Gwyn ‘In the year 2525/ if man is still alive/ if woman is to survive/ they may find…’ — Zager and Evans. INTRODUCTION So Ray Kurzweil has given his keynote address at SLCC. High time I delivered an essay on his…
Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
‘I’m the urban spaceman baby, here comes the twist: I don’t exist’ – Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band. On the 23rd June 2009 at 3:23 pm (pst), Gwyn said something rather strange. It probably did not strike her as such, and is not likely to seem odd to you either. That is because we are not evolved to understand death. But, we are jumping ahead of ourselves. First, I should reveal…
Google and The Red Queen – An Essay By Extropia DaSilva
No, it’s not about Google Wave — but you still might find it entertaining reading! — Gwyn “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place” – Lewis Carrol. INTRODUCTION This essay, which is all about the evolution of search engines, begins (peculiarly enough) with the extraordinarily toxic rough-skinned newt, which can be found in the Pacific Northwest. Of all the…
Bees And Flowers: An Essay By Extropia DaSilva
“Why did this woman collect dolls? Was it one specific moment where she suddenly said, ‘I know: dolls’? Or was it a whole series of things, starting from when her parents first met that somehow combined in such a way that, in the end, she had no choice but to be a doll collector”? — spoken by Clyde Bruckman, a character in an episode of ‘The X-Files’. INTRODUCTION. Do you…
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