Onlife

IACAP, the International Association for Computing And Philosophy, invites applications for the Covey Award and the Goldberg Graduate Award. The purpose of the awards is to provide recognition for faculty and graduate students engaged in innovative work in the field of computing and philosophy. For a description of the two awards and information about how to apply, you are invited to visit the website of the Association .

I just seen that the following new book is available. It might be interesting to the PI community: Philosophy of Technology , edited by Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen & Evan Selinger. Philosophy of Technology is a collection of short interviews based on 5 questions presented to some of the most influential and prominent scholars in this field. We hear their views on technology, its aim, scope, use, the future, and how their work fits in these respects. Contributors include: Joseph Agassi, Albert Borgmann, Mario Bunge, Harry Collins, Paul Durbin, Andrew Feenberg, Joan H. Fujimura, Peter Galison, Allan Hanson, Donna J. Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Don Ihde, Ian C. Jarvie, Bruno Latour, Bill McKibben, Carl Mitcham, Andrew Pickering, Daniel Sarewitz, Evan Selinger, Dan A. Seni, Peter Singer, Susan Leigh Star, Isabelle Stengers, and Lucy Suchman.

On the road (or rather on the flight) for twelve days to deliver four lectures and meet several colleagues and friends at the University of Arizona (Tucson), Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh) and University of Indiana (Bloomington). It is useful to be reminded of how different and articulated this country is. Center for Consciousness Studies (Arizona University) ISI Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture (Arizona University) Philosophy Department Colloquium (Arizona University) School of Informatics Colloquium (Indiana University)

The home toilet: the last frontier of an individual's private space, where you can finally lock the door, sit down and do some thinking undisturbed by the rest of the world and its vociferous crowd. Drinking a lot of water is very good not only for your body, but for your mind too, because it gives you that extra excuse to spend time with yourself, reflecting on the meaning of life while taking care of your natural functions. Until recently, browsing was a sort of toilet experience. Done alone. No need to be shy or embarrassed by the daily checking and visiting of sites other people may find weird, useless, stupid, improper, you-name-it. "You browsed what?!" was not a question that needed to be answered, because nobody was there to ask it. The pleasures of a lonely and silent space. Of course, gregarious people have always felt this was not quite alright. The siblinghood of let's-get- togethers love to meet, share, communicate, partake, aggregate, associate. How co...

Time for subtle ontological distinctions to cut deep, and deep in your pocket. Ebay has just banned online auctions of virtual booty (gold, armor, weapons and all the rest) gained in World of Warcraft and other online computer games ("Ebay would not disclose the volume of sales of virtual game items recorded on its website, which reported 53.5 billion dollars worth of online auction trades in 2006"). At the same time, Ebay has not banned similar auctions concerning Second Life , the (no not a game!) ... virtual world and society where people (do not call them players), also represented by animated figures known as "avatars", buy and sell properties, like homes or land. Both an armor (in World of Warcraft) and a home (in Second Life) are made of digits, "just" computer codes, so why the different treatment? Because, according to Ebay, there is a difference between the contexts: games, in one case, virtual societies in the other. The distinction is untenab...

A long time since I last had the leisure to contribute to this blog... On Saturday 27 January, Sweden began yearlong celebrations to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus (May 23, 1707 – January 10, 1778), it s most famous scientist. Linnaeus is known as the father of modern taxonomy and of ecology. Before him, scientists had tried a variety of criteria to map and organize the world in some decent, rational way. His fundamental idea was to use sex, or rather systems of procreation and reproduction. Since then, whales no longer count as fish, while rats and humans share a closer destiny. He understood the underlying fabric of life better than anyone else who had come before him. And he saw economics and ecology as strictly related. Linnaeus certainly knew som ething about the life of information. His mapping was based on a new naming convention, known as the "binary nomenclature", which has come to dominate natural history and other scientific fields. Fo...

Popular wisdom can be frightening. Past errors? Normally unrecoverable, better learn to live with their consequences. Second chances in the future? Rare, don’t count on them. Present predicament? Uncertain at best, so grin and bear it. In the long run, time is an entropic roller coaster where some local ups inevitably tend to an overall down and a halt. This is life at its nakedest. Blackish as the picture might be, it has a pinch of serenity in it. Pessimists can only be pleasantly astonished, never bitterly disappointed. It is with this wisdom that we used to approach Microsoft products and especially Windows. Install some unusual program, press the wrong series of keys, or double-click too nervously on some buttons and down you went with your computer crashing. And if you screwed-up your operating system you knew that it was like a sour marriage: dead was the past idyll, you could only hope to divorce and restart from scratch. Cut your losses, unplug, press the off button, format th...