lauchl.in

Interesting links from 6-7th March 2009

A mixed bag of reading over the last few days.

• Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? - http://www.simulation-argument.com/
  Not sure what to make of this one. Go read it yourself.
• David Chalmers - http://consc.net/chalmers/
  A collection of stuff by David Chalmers on consciousness and philosophy.
• Derek Parfit - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit
  
• Introduction to Guice Video (Redux) - http://crazybob.org/2007/06/introduction-to-guice-video-redux.html
  Bob Lee (one of the creators of Guice) demonstrated how Guice simplifies dependency injection.
• google-guice - http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/
  
• Chinese 'gold farmers' making a living playing computer games - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/05/virtual-world-china
  Gold farming makes main-stream news again.
• Why this economy is good for IT operations - http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030509-forrester-economy.html
  Forrester talks up the IT sector. I'm not sure if the analysis is over simplistic or not.
• How to stop the drug wars - http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13237193
  Should be titled "Why to stop the drug wars". Prohibition still doesn't work.

Consciousness Explained

by Daniel C. Dennett

Partially to alleviate the pain of commuting on the central line, and partially just because I am interested, I've been reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett over the past few weeks.  It has been slow progress but am a pleased to say I am finally near the end, at least close enough to write something about it.

Although I've seen a few talks by Dennett this is the first of his books I have read and I am please to say that I found it quite entertaining and informing reading.   I still feel like I don't know enough about the subject matter to carry out a well informed debate but I do feel I know enough to say that I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in probing the topic of consciousness, artificial intelligence and what it means to be a self.

I found having read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and pretty much any book by Richard Dawkins helped me understand some of the concepts that Dennet covered and would highly recommend reading these books before or after reading Consciousness Explained.

A few critics have complained that Dennett does little more than explain consciousness away rather than explain it, but I am still having troubles coming to grips with that point of view as everything Dennett wrote seemed to make sense to me. At least now I have a healthy list of further reading to do to try and understand the opposing argument!