The Ontological Basis of Strong Artificial Life

This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers ("virtual" strong alife). I ask what sort of things these computer-generated organisms are supposed to be (where are they, and what are they made of?). I consider four possible answers to this question: (a) The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; (b) they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; (c) they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and (d) they are denizens of an entire artificial world, different from our own, that the programmer creates. I argue that (a) could not be right, that (c) collapses into (b), and that (d) would make strong alife either absurd or uninteresting. Thus, "virtual" strong alife amounts to the claim that, by programming a computer, one can literally bring bits of its hardware to life

Composition and Coincidence

[First Paragraph] Suppose we take a pound of gold and mold it into the shape of Hermes. Then, it would seem, we shall have a golden statue of Hermes, beautiful to behold. We shall also have a lump of gold. And we have the makings of a well-known philosophical puzzle. Many people find it obvious that if we crushed the statue or melted it down, we should destroy the statue but not the lump of gold. The lump can be deformed and still continue to exist, but the statue cannot; that is the nature of lumps and statues. So the lump can outlive the statue. Since nothing can outlive itself, it is natural to conclude that the one-pound gold statue and the one-pound lump of gold in our example are numerically different. And as statues are to lumps, they say, so are brick houses to heaps of bricks, living organisms to masses of matter, and people to their bodies. More generally, certain atoms (or elementary particles or what have you) often compose two numerically different material objects at once. To put it another way, two different material objects may have all the same proper parts (the same parts except themselves) at once. Because of its many defenders and its intuitive attraction, I will call this the Popular View about lumps and statues and other familiar material objects

Was Jekyll Hyde?

Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split-personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split-personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals

Association of Christian Librarians

Have you known of an organization that has survived for 25 years without a salaried personnel, where no one has gone on strike for higher wages or overtime pay, or where no one has asked about retirement benefits or federal aid? Yet this organization has grown constantly, is regularly putting out two publications, never lacks for a place for an annual conference and has plenty of volunteer help from year to year. This is the CHRISTIAN LIBRARIANS’ FELLOWSHIP now known as the ASSOCIATION OF CHRISTIAN LIBRARIANS

A Taste of Hong Kong

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Jake Olson describes his observations during his study abroad program at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong

Rethinking Our Work With Multilingual Writers: The Ethics and Responsibility of Language Teaching in the Writing Center

'Just shy of 9 AM on one of the last days of the semester, I raced into the writing center. Waiting for my first writer, I hastily checked my email where the subject line “SOS from June1” jumped out at me. June was a writer I knew well, and she was one of my former students in a writing center studio course for multilingual writers. Reading June’s email, her panic was apparent; she was extremely concerned with how a professor was grading her writing in a particular course. Though she had tried to discuss her concerns with her instructor, her account to me indicated this had been futile: “he said that this class is difficult and he cannot help me any more."'University Writing Cente

There is No Problem of the Self

Because there is no agreed use of the term ‘self’, or characteristic features or even paradigm cases of selves, there is no idea of ‘the self’ to figure in philosophical problems. The term leads to troubles otherwise avoidable; and because legitimate discussions under the heading of ‘self’ are really about other things, it is gratuitous. I propose that we stop speaking of selves

Promoting Awareness of the Opioid Epidemic in Rural Vermont

Vermont is in the middle of an opioid epidemic. Heroin use fatalities are on the rise and the number of people in treatment for opioid use disorder in Rutland County has tripled in recent years. Despite this widespread problem, community members of Rutland County feel that there is reluctance to talk about opioid misuse and lack of awareness. This project aims to bring awareness, provide resources, and encourage people struggling with opioid use disorder to seek treatment.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1258/thumbnail.jp

“Relationship Connectivity” Counts:Lifetime Relationships, Family Structure, andRisk-Taking in Adulthood

The impacts of interpersonal relationships (in childhood and in early adulthood) on risk-taking behavior of young adults were the focus of this research. Data from the 2012 New Family Structures Survey (using a subset of 2,917 young adults aged 18-39), disaggregated by whether the respondents grew up in conventional or unconventional households, were augmented with eight interviews with health and counseling professionals. Healthy early family relationships and current romantic relationships offered the best protections against adult risk-taking behavior, irrespective of family household structure. On the other hand, a healthy parent-child relationship in adulthood and bullying victimization in childhood were both linked to increased risk-taking in later years, but only if raised in unconventional families. These findings contributed to the empirical literature on the consequences of healthy relationships, with natal families, peers, and partners, for positive life decisions and partly illuminated Agnew’s Strain and Aker’s Social Control Theories. Exploring a fuller range of unconventional family structures, a broader variety of risk-taking behaviors, and whether said behaviors turn into addictions will better highlight the long-term consequences of relationship connectivity for adult risk-taking