The Morning of January 15th

    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?" 







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday (1/7/21) - Justin

Image
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)
Read more

Simulacras (Afternoon of 01/11/21)

Image
 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
Read more

Smoke & Mirrors (Afternoon of 01/06/21)

Image
     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
Read more