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 […]
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’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 […]