Mark Silcox

How can _Wii Sports_ teach us about metaphysics? Can playing _World of Warcraft_ lead to greater self-consciousness? How can we learn about aesthetics, ethics and divine attributes from _Zork_, _Grand Theft Auto_, and _Civilization_? A variety of increasingly sophisticated video games are rapidly overtaking books, films, and television as America's most popular form of media entertainment. It is estimated that by 2011 over 30 percent of US households will own a Wii console - about the same percentage that owned a television in 1953. In _Philosophy Through Video Games, _Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox - philosophers with game industry experience - investigate the aesthetic appeal of video games, their effect on our morals, the insights they give us into our understanding of perceptual knowledge, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of life itself, arguing that video games are popular precisely because they engage with longstanding philosophical problems. Topics covered include: * The Problem of the External World * Dualism and Personal Identity * Artificial and Human Intelligence in the Philosophy of Mind * The Idea of Interactive Art * The Moral Effects of Video Games * Games and God's Goodness Games discussed include: _Madden Football_, _Wii Sports_, _Guitar Hero_, _World of Warcraft_, _Sims Online_, _Second Life_, _Baldur's Gate_, _Knights of the Old Republic_, _Elder Scrolls_, _Zork_, _EverQuest_ _Doom_, _Halo 2_, _Grand Theft Auto_, _Civilization_, _Mortal Kombat_, _Rome: Total War_, _Black and White_, _Aidyn Chronicles_

It is often helpful in metaphysics to reflect upon the principles that govern how existence claims are made in logic and mathematics. Consider, for example, the different ways in which mathematicians construct inductive definitions. In order to provide an inductive definition of a class of mathematical entities, one must first define a base class and then stipulate further conditions for inclusion by reference to the properties of members of the base class. These conditions can be deflationary, so that the target class is a subclass of the base class, or inflationary, so that the base class is an important subclass of the target class. For example, in defining the set of well-formed sentences of first order logic, one can begin with the set of all possible strings and, in a deflationary manner, exclude the nonsentences. Or one can begin with the set of atomic formulae, and in an inflationary manner, build more complicated sentences out of the atomic formulae

Many writers who have discussed the Singularity have treated it not only as the inevitable outcome of advancements in cybernetic technology, but also as natural consequence of broader patterns in the development of human knowledge, or of human history itself. In this paper I examine these claims in light of Karl Popper’s famous philosophical critique of historicism. I argue that, because the Singularity is regarded as both a product of human ingenuity and a reflection of the permanent limitations of our rational capacities, speculation about its likelihood occupies an interesting border zone between what Popper referred to as “technological prediction” and what he lambasted as “prophecy.” I go on to examine representations of a post-singularity world in the novels of Iain M. Banks, as well as in Bruce Sterling’s short story “The Beautiful and the Sublime.” These narratives demonstrate how trying to imagine what human life might be like in the presence of intellectually superior AIs requires a more aggressively skeptical attitude toward the human capacity to understand our own history than even Popper was prepared to allow for.

About halfway through the twentieth century, it became a fairly common practice amongst philosophers and psychologists to speculate about the procedures whereby human beings might come to understand one another's speech in what have come to be known as the circumstances of "radical interpretation." Writers belonging to this tradition shared a common curiosity about how understanding of a human language might be achieved by an investigator to whom that language was more or less totally unfamiliar. Philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke have made use of speculations about this sort of situation to argue for the existence of a general "rationality constraint" upon the methods of linguistic interpretation. According to these authors, an agent is not to be counted as the speaker of a genuinely meaningful, interpretable human language unless that agent may also be taken to be capable of exhibiting at least some minimal level of rationality in his thought and in his actions. ;Over the course of the dissertation I provide a detailed investigation of the notion of "rationality" as it is used by philosophers in this tradition. I divide philosophers who have written on the epistemology of radical interpretation into two schools of thought, distinguishable on the basis of their reliance upon either empiricist or rationalistic presuppositions about how knowledge is acquired in the human sciences. I then proceed to catalogue the shortcomings of each of these two quite different approaches to interpretational methodology, in something like the spirit of Kant's Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics. The principal positive conclusion that I arrive at as the result of these inquiries is that the only way of avoiding outright skepticism in our understanding of the methods whereby linguistic understanding is achieved by the so-called 'radical' interpreter is to adopt a distinctively Peircean notion of rationality. According to this notion, the truly rational agent is one whose methods of inquiry approximate those of an individual who is in possession of complete information about the natural world