Science Fiction and Philosophy. From Time Travel to Superintelligence. Edited by Susan Schneider. Introduction and Part 1. 🧠🧠🧠🧠

Essays on philosophical concepts using elements from Science fiction literature and films. I read the Introduction and Part 1 which includes 1 short story, 2 essays and 2 extracts from classic Philosophy works. 

Introduction: excellent. Clarifies some of the concepts to be explored throughout the book and provides some examples from literature and films. 

1. Reinstalling Eden: Happiness on a hard drive by Eric Schwitzgebel and R. Scott Bakker. Loved it. It's about a researcher who creates a virtual woman and then a partner for her. As they develop a relationship the researcher starts using more computing resources to provided a better world for them. But when should he stop? 

2. Are you in a Computer Simulation? by Nick Bostrom. Four pages of dense text with Bostrom trying to convince the reader why we might be living in a simulation. And yes, we might 🤔 I liked one point Bostrom makes: If we are in a simulation, Afterlife might be possible. We can be recreated in another simulation or maybe we can be brought to the real world. 

3. Plato's Cave. Excerpt from the Republic. Not my cup of tea. 

4. Some Cartesian thought experiments. Descartes: do our minds exist outside space-time? 🤔 

5. The Matrix as Metaphysics by David J. Chalmers. My favourite chapter in Part 1. Discussing ideas about humans living in a simulation or a matrix. The author explains the Matrix Hypothesis (are we in a Matrix?), Envatment (brain in a vat) and the Skeptical Hypothesis (which explains how some beliefs, if true, would falsify every other beliefs we have). The aim of the essay is to explain why, for Chalmers, Matrix Hypothesis and Envatment are not skeptical Hypothesis but Metaphysical Hypothesis (concerned with the fundamental nature of reality).