Philosophy, World Constructions, and Online Gaming

     We started off our last day of the Philosophy, World building, and Online Gaming J-term with a warm up where everyone drew how they were feeling with their eyes closed and the other students had to guess what they were trying to depict. We then moved into minecraft to work on our final responses. We ultimately didn't get a chance to formally visit each person's response though many students built things related to or inspired by The Good Place and/or  The Social Dilemma. After the server suddenly crashed, we moved back onto zoom to begin our final seminar. The purpose of this seminar was to put together everything that we had touched on during this J-term. We discussed questions like, "When do simulations become real and how do we know when they go too far?" and, "How do we act differently in a virtual world/ simulation from how we act in the real world?" 

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

 In the afternoon, we took a look at Jean Baudrillard's ideas about simulations. His philosophical ideas classify simulations into four different orders which are 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order simulacra. Each one of these orders represents different levels of simulations and our understanding of reality. The first order is most easily described as a photo of something such as a model of the Eiffel tower. People can easily tell that it is a representation of the landmark but know that it isn't the real thing. This changes when we go into the higher orders of simulacra. Second-order simulacra mask and pervert what we know as reality. This is when the representation becomes easily imitated or starts to threaten to replace the original reality. One of the examples that we discussed was artificial flavors used in things like icees. Although a grape slushie may not be made with real grapes, we have come to associate the sweet, purple slush to taste like grape. Due to this falsified as

      The morning of January 11th, 2021 started with a padlet discussion related to the topics of last week. It was a forum that was intended to bring up major questions, discussion points, and misunderstandings about those topics. It was also supposed to connect the media we went over to the philosophical theories we looked at. After this discussion was done we got a short break before speaking on the Minecraft skins we created on Friday, we spoke on what specifically we did and our creative process in creating them. This took about half an hour. Afterwards, we were given quite a lot of time to work on our responses to the media we had watched last week. The examples of which I could find on the server are showcased below. A recreation of 'The Stacks' from 'Ready Player One' The corporate HQ of Sayer Charnquist inc. quite a reputable company in my opinion The first floor of a house built into the trunk of a massive tree.

This morning in our Philosophy, World Constructions, and Online Gaming J-term, we delved into what it truly means to be a “cyborg”. In the eyes of professor Donna Haraway and the “Cyborg Manifesto” she created, a cyborg is merely the use of technological advancements to enhance one's own attributes, physical or otherwise. After reading a brief summary of this manifesto and some of the more relevant excerpts, we searched for our own examples of cyborgs in the modern media. This ranged from characters such as Cyborg from the DC Universe to Stanley Kubrick's HAL, from the infamous 2001:  A Space Odyssey. (Ren introducing Ginga Testudo 999) (Niko presenting on Cyborg from the DC Universe) (Neil Harbisson explaining how his vision uses color) (Izabella Curtis further explaining Neil Harbisson's situation)

   This afternoon in the Philosophy, World Constructions, and Online Gaming J term we examined A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna J. Haraway. We then came back and did presentations on examples of cyborgs. For instance, Haraway claims Olympic athletes are cyborgs through the interaction of medicine, diet, training practices, clothing and equipment manufacture, visualization and timekeeping. This inspired my presentation on how LeBron James is a cyborg. We had a very fall aesthetic conversation in an effort to define what a cyborg is and how we see cyborgs within society. Does using running shoes, glasses, or even drones and cars make us cyborgs? This is what the seminar tried to nail down. After this seminar, we were then free to go express these philosophers’ ideas in Minecraft.  Here we have a student who related Plato‘s allegory of the cave to the matrix train station scene. Here we have a representation of the events described in Plato‘s allegory of the cave. You can’t play Minecraft with

     In the afternoon, our eccentric collective of gamers, philosophers, and architects brought all of these different aspects together. After leaving the simulation for a quick lunch break, we all reconvened to discuss the themes of The Matrix and how we could tie in yesterday's seminar about Plato's Allegory of the Cave into the plot of the movie. One of the most apparent connections that we discussed was the psychological parallel between the prisoners in the cave and those stuck in the Matrix. In both stories, the people are presented with a false reality and an option to see past the illusion which they have been led to believe. When presented with such an earth-shattering truth, the characters in both stories find it hard to accept that everything they believe in is a lie. If only Orpheus had been there to convince the prisoners in the cave to take the red pill. Maybe if they had been presented with the choice in such an exciting and tense way, they would've wanted to

 Right after our lunch break, We got right into discussing philosophy via our ancient pal Plato. The work that we discussed was the allegory of the cave. In this story there are a few people chained in a cave unable to move even their heads, they spend their whole lives that way looking at a cave wall. Behind these people there is a fire lighting up that wall, and people holding objects that cast shadows on said wall. This was the way they grew up in, only knowing the cave and the shadows, so this is what they thought the whole world was (which conveniently ties in to the world construction part of this course). As I research now I am finding different tellings of the story, but essentially one of the people gets loose and goes into the outside world. At first this person is scared because everything is new, and in our discussion we agreed that people are usually afraid of change, which is logical because why would people want to go out of their comfort zone into a realm of uncertainty

Now I know the title is Tuesday Morning Minecraft but it sounds a lot more interesting than what actually happened. Today we worked on setting up Minecraft and Discord. Unfortunately I am not the most adept at technology so I had the most problems. But it was also the network so not totally my fault. We all downloaded or signed into our Minecraft accounts that the school provided. Joy new life skills. After we finished installing Minecraft, we moved on to Discord which is a chat app thing. Again not super knowledgeable in technology. Anyways, we finished setting up Discord but then we had to connect Discord and Minecraft! It was very confusing and although Dr. Cobos and Mr. Beradino were very helpful it was just not working. Okay that makes me sound not very smart so lets just say it was 30% me not understanding and 70% the computer/tech issues. Finally everyone finished setting everything up but by then the morning was over and it was time for lunch. Although it wasn't the funnest