Here's some brain-melting weekend viewing related to the ongoing question about whether reality itself is actually a virtual world. I don't know exactly where UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë lands on that question, but he definitely raises some heavy complications on the challenge of simulating consciousness, let alone the world. Or as he put it in an essay for NPR:
Philosophers and biologists like to compare the living organism to a machine. And once that's on the table, we are lead to wonder whether various kinds of human-made machines could have minds like ours, too. But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value. It seeks nourishment. It makes itself — and in making itself it introduces meaning into the universe.
Then again, if the OpenWorm Project guys seriously impress the Royal Society with their simulation of virtual life, it might be time to reconsider that point of view!
Pic via Edge.org's profile of Noë, also worth a read.
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