dreaming and reality

• science fiction
• science fact
• remarks

science fiction readings

• Jorge Luis Borges
• The Circular Ruins
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
• Ursula LeGuin
• The Lathe of Heaven (+film, The Lathe of Heaven)
• Philip K. Dick
  • The Unteleported Man
  • Eye in the Sky
  • The Martian Time-Slip
  • Time out of Joint
  • Ubik
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (+film, Blade Runner)
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (+film, Waking Life)
  • (+film, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick)
  • (+film, The Nervous Breakdown of Philip K. Dick)

science fact readings

1. Meditation I. Of the things of which we may doubt, R. Descartes (Latin original 1641; English translation 1907).
2. *Sleep imaging and the neuropsychological assessment of dreams, S. Schwartz and P. Maquet, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6:23-30 (2002).
3. The Simulation Argument: are you living in a computer simulation?, N. Bostrom (2001)

   ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

remarks

• meeting 1: Descartes; Borges and LeGuin (Jan 20)
• meeting 2: Schwartz and Maquet; Dick (Jan 27)
• meeting 3: Bostrom; Dick (Feb 3)