Lecture Of The Day

Hi all,

Today's lecture was on the philosophy of the virtual worlds. We started out with a podcast of a news program about the American government's illegal wiretapping scandal that came about after a tech working for AT&T took his story to the media about a secret room that housed an information splitter that took a copy of all the traffic that was passing through that exchange.

We then went on to discuss a quick history of various philosophers that have provided us with theories which seek to explain the world around us and the ways in which we perceive our surroundings. This conversation developed into the theories of subjective experience where the way in which individual's perceive their environment is dictated by the sum of their combined previous experience. Personally I find this type of conversation fascinating because it brings into question the our current scientific knowledge and how we each apply our knowledge when we interact with our surroundings.

There was list of philosophers who all contributed to our current base of knowledge in no particular order Guy Debord who gave us 'Society of Spectacle' or the over watching omnipotent 'big brother'; Umberto Eco who gave us the theory of our existence being a 'hyper-reality'; Jean Baudrillard with his theory of the 'Simulacrum', as a side note Jean's theories were used as a background for the series of movies 'The Matrix'; William Gibson who gave us 'Cyberspace as a Consensual Hallucination' and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with their combined post modern theory of 'Becoming Media'.

The lecture then went on to focus on the Greek philosophers who are attributed as being the founding fathers of philosophy, covering the Socrates' Method and the allegory of Plato's cave. I find it interesting that 'cyberspace' as we know it is Platoism as a working product, with the separation of the mind and body. The issue is that instead of bringing certainty about one world, this concept of cyberspace has just provided us with all the confusions of current scientific theory which embraces such abstractions as Chaos Theory and the Uncertainty Principle.

One of the major problems that researchers are having problems with, is understanding the difference that exists between the mind and the body, with one of the central myths of western society being Cartesian dualism - the split between the mind and the body. With the development of 3d virtual environments this abstract dividing line has become more concrete.

The lecture notes go on to talk about the history and development of the various media up until today with the virtual environments. Starting with the telegraph in 1837, moving on to the telephone in 1876, then to the Phonograph 1876 for recording sound. In 1895 the radio was introduced and with it the wireless telegraph, the lecture notes go on to talk about the development of cinema as we know it, then on to television with a brief explanation of how the images are captured transmitted and finally viewed by you.

We finished the lecture with a video about the rise of the computer program 'Second Life', looking at how the concept was first conceived and how they decided to implement their idea into reality. The major draw card of Second Life appears to be it's economy, from which people can use real world money to purchase in game currency and most importantly the ability to convert their in game currency into real world money again. This brought up a number of issue regarding the legal ramifications of having virtual assets and how you exert control over your assets, also how other people could steal from you in game. The general gist of the article seemed to be about the fact that technology is advancing at a staggering rate and governments are falling behind.

Well, that's it for this post time to work on my task for the day.

BYE ^_^