Onlife

On May 23, the Maldives became the first country to open an embassy in Second Life (SL), the web-based, virtual world inhabited by more than 6.5 million avatars (computer-generated residents), beating Sweden by a week. A quick look at the daily press shows that the popularity of SL is increasing exponentially. But this is not the main reason why philosophers should pay attention to it. SL is nothing short of the largest and most realistic thought experiment ever attempted, a true mine for philosophical research. Of course, this is not exactly how Linden Lab sees it, but just a few examples can easily drive the point home. Ontologically, in SL the existential criterion seems to be some degree of “interactability” (x exists only if it can be interacted with) rather than a modal or temporal feature (x exists only if its essence is eternal and immutable) or an epistemic test (x exists only if it can be perceived). Your avatar might be there, but if it does not interact with its environment...

I recently read two books: Information: The New Language of Science (2003) by Hans Christian Von Baeyer and Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes (2006), by Charles Seife. Both belong to that very readable, scientifically well-researched form of literature so popular in the English-speaking world. You know you are part of the semi-mythical EP ("educated public") if you enjoy reading such books. Both books talk about information in terms of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, i.e., not in terms of something out there (like patterns in the environment, for example) and not in terms of something inside here (like meaningful things in one's head, for exampel). Both books are based on the same idea: information is everything. Both leave unclear whether this means that scientifically , everything can be explained in terms of information (theory); or whether, computa...

This year the topic of the Italian Biotech Law Conference 2007 was "ownership of bioinformation", a very thorny issue. The conference turned out to be very interesting. It was, unfortunately, too short and perhaps badly timed, as most people at IFOM seemed to be thinking more about the Easter break than research. Having said this, I probably learnt much more than I contributed, since all the papers were very insightful. In my own contribution, I argued that, ultimately, genes are literally information (although a procedural kind of it) and that this interpretation allows one to unify, in a single approach to informational realism, both physics and biology. Basically, it makes a lot of sense to adopt a level of abstraction at which all processes, properties and entities, no matter whether just physical or also biological, are ultimately made of information. The previous thesis can be summarised through a slogan: in biology, the medium is the message. Linguistically, this means...

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Welcome to the IEG newsletter ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In this issue: - Publications - Forthcoming - Conferences & Talks - Others ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Publications ----------------------------------------------------------------------- - P. Allo: . "Local Information and Adaptive Consequence", Logique & Analyse , 49(196): 461-488. - P. Allo & L. Floridi: . "Logic and the Philosophy of Information", Special issue of Logique & Analyse , 49(196). - L. Floridi: . "A look into the future impact of ICT on our lives", The Information Society . 2007, 23.1, 59-64. An abridged and modified version was published in TidBITS . . "Ética de la Información, su Naturaleza y Alcance" Spanish translation by Roberto Feltrero and ...

The Digital Image , an interdisciplinary symposium from the Oxford e-Research Centre, took place on Friday 16th March. David Shotton had the brilliant idea to bring together Oxford academics who have interests in or are actively working with digital image data, across all disciplines. We described existing projects and activities, discussed state-of-the-art digital imaging and image processing techniques, talked about common interests concerning the description of images and knowledge extraction from digital image resources. It fell on me to present a philosophical view of digital images today. I talked mainly about avatars in Second Life . I should say that, as a member of the audience, the meeting was a fantastic success. I personally felt that I learnt more during that symposium than by attending so many boring conferences. The thing is that the speakers made a real effort not only to talk about digital images but also about their own fields in a way that was informative an...

"PITTSBURGH — March 26, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. and Carnegie Mellon University today announced the creation of the Microsoft Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking. The center was made possible through a three-year, $1.5 million grant from Microsoft." More information here

The new issue of the IACAP Newsletter, which contains much information about the Association, relevant CFP, etc. is now available at http://www.ia-cap.org/newsletter.php If you work in the area, you may be interested in: - the Covey Award , and - the Goldberg Graduate Award which are available for faculty and graduate students.