Philosophy, World Constructions, and Online Gaming

Today was the 7th day of the Philosophy, World Constructions, and Online Gaming J term course. Early in the morning, we watched several episodes of the show The Good Place. These episodes brought up several important philosophical questions, including the Trolley Problem. In the Afternoon portion of the class, this Trolley Problem was brought up again. We created and then presented slideshows about a specific philosopher or philosophical concept. Through one of these presentations, we learned that Philippa Foot was the person behind the Trolley Problem.  We finished up the day by documenting our earlier response work. This work was done through Minecraft, which allowed us to create almost anything. 

  Philosophy J Term Blog - January 14th - John Mazziotti Today was our 9th day in the Philosophy and World Building J-Term! We had a vast array of informative presentations, great discussions, and final response building in Minecraft.      First, we did our group presentations on individual philosophers. These presentations consisted of a small biography of the philosopher, some of the values that the philosopher stood for, and remarks on our group’s conversation about the philosopher. These presentations were purely informative, so after we completed them, the whole class had a seminar.  Our second activity was watching The Social Dilemma . This documentary described the process of how our phones are not only being monitored, but how they are customized by an algorithm to better suit the user. It discussed how the root of this user customized algorithm and targeted advertising can be found to be rooted in Social media and  platforms like Google. After watching this documentary, we had

 Twas the second day of Philosophy and World Building in Minecraft. We began our morning in Minecraft getting acquainted with our recently generated cubed representation of reality   however, the majority of our morning was absorbed by watching 1999's film with indescribably alluring sfx, the Matrix, in relation to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

After lunch, we had a fascinating discussion about the social dilemma (10/10 would recommend). The social dilemma was a documentary about the recurring issues within social media platforms and “free” search engine platforms (stuff like Google). I’m not going to get into the details of this documentary too much, just because watching the actual documentary will explain it better. But basically, the creators and managers of various social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, and basically every platform) got together and confessed about marketing strategies and the ideology behind creating the “like” button and refreshing the page is essentially a slot machine. Our discussion was not only clarifying the ideas within the documentary but maki ng connections to all the other topics/philosophy theories/ movies we had encountered in these past nine days. I found myself connecting this documentary to the Good Place and Baudrillard’s theories. I think the social dilemma brought up

  In the morning we started off the day by finishing up an exercise from the day before; reading about Jeans Buadrillard idea simulations and the four orders of simulacra and simulations. We had a few short conversations on the topic and then moved to Minecraft to start on our responses to anything we've discussed over the past few days. We spent the rest of the morning working in Minecraft and towards the end, we started presenting what everyone built. After a few presentations, we took a break for lunch and continued our presentations in the afternoon.  Jean Baudrillard

     The way we started this afternoon was a continuation of our last activity in the morning as we finished looking at each other's response buildings that we did in Minecraft. This took up roughly the first 30 minutes of the afternoon until we went into or second and last activity for the afternoon. This final activity was watching the first two episodes from season one of The Good Place and finishing up with the first two episodes of season two of The Good Place . These episodes were selected as they focused on some of the philosophies that we have discussed and will introduce us to new philosophers in our final week of J-Term. Although our afternoon was not as immersive as the others have been it was still interesting to learn about the show and think of how it ties into our J-Term experience. The show and its philosophies will spark an interesting conversation when we finish watching more episodes tomorrow.    A statue of The Iron Giant in Response to Ready Player One A treeh