Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy PDF Download

Author: David J. Chalmers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635813
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already. Along the way, Chalmers conducts a grand tour of big ideas in philosophy and science. He uses virtual reality technology to offer a new perspective on long-established philosophical questions. How do we know that there’s an external world? Is there a god? What is the nature of reality? What’s the relation between mind and body? How can we lead a good life? All of these questions are illuminated or transformed by Chalmers’ mind-bending analysis. Studded with illustrations that bring philosophical issues to life, Reality+ is a major statement that will shape discussion of philosophy, science, and technology for years to come.

Author: Gregoire Plus
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1450022294
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
ARE YOU IN REALITY? The quest for wisdom or man’s search for what reality is in his experiences comes from man’s astonishment in front of all that exist. When we see something, we are lucid that we do not know the whole; that which is the most profound is so hidden from our eyes that we easily prefer believing our own ideas to searching to unveil what the reality is. Rather than to be toward something we have not made and that escapes us, we prefer to remain in the ideas we construct, or to contemplate our own image. We need to seek if we Are truly living in reality or if we remain in our ideas as the only full discovery of reality as it is can be a path to wisdom and allow us to blossom. Written from a series of seminars, Are You in Reality is the author’s contribution coming from his own experiences to the research of wisdom understood as man’s search for truth. This search for wisdom, rightly called philosophy, is a quest without any preconceived ideas, an insatiable desire for light which can ultimately enlighten man about every aspect of his existence. It must be capable of meeting each man in his experiences, in his quest, and in his own journey. Therefore, philosophy is neither Christian nor Buddhist, neither European nor American, neither African nor Asian. It is human and intelligent in the sense that it takes its truth from no other source than that of the real that we encounter and of those who place themselves at its school.

Author: Donald Hoffman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254704
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

Author: Scott H. Young
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062852744
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Now a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Learn a new talent, stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way. Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly. This is the essential guide to future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage through self-education. In these tumultuous times of economic and technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education—a lifelong mastery of fresh ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. The challenge of learning new skills is that you think you already know how best to learn, as you did as a student, so you rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems. To counter that, Ultralearning offers powerful strategies to break you out of those mental ruts and introduces new training methods to help you push through to higher levels of retention. Scott H. Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Benjamin Franklin, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymath Nigel Richards, who won the French World Scrabble Championship—without knowing French. Young documents the methods he and others have used to acquire knowledge and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares a proven framework for a successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and exe - cute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple tools to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451675046
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The author addresses key scientific questions previously explained by rich mythologies, from the evolution of the first humans and the life cycle of stars to the principles of a rainbow and the origins of the universe.

Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241302471
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. With clarity and an infectious sense of joy, he guides us through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how it works. Through these pages, we come to see our reality in a new way--bigger, fuller, and stranger than it looked before. Synthesizing basic questions, facts, and dazzling speculations, Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover. Brilliant, lucid, and accessible, this celebration of human ingenuity and imagination will expand your world and your mind.

Author: Danielle J. Lindemann, PhD
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Esquire A sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium—and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality What do we see when we watch reality television? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” of this genre. From the first episodes of The Real World to countless rose ceremonies to the White House, reality TV has not just remade our entertainment and cultural landscape (which it undeniably has). Reality TV, Lindemann argues, uniquely reflects our everyday experiences and social topography back to us. Applying scholarly research—including studies of inequality, culture, and deviance—to specific shows, Lindemann layers sharp insights with social theory, humor, pop cultural references, and anecdotes from her own life to show us who we really are. By taking reality TV seriously, True Story argues, we can better understand key institutions (like families, schools, and prisons) and broad social constructs (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). From The Bachelor to Real Housewives to COPS and more (so much more!), reality programming unveils the major circuits of power that organize our lives—and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed. Whether we’re watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these “guilty pleasures” underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about who or what counts as legitimate or “real.” At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story holds up a mirror to our society: the reflection may not always be pretty—but we can’t look away.

Author: Paul Angone
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310341434
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
All Groan Up: Searching for Self, Faith, and A Freaking Job! is the story of the GenY/Millennial generation told through the individual story of author Paul Angone. It’s a story of struggle, hope, failure, and doubts in the twilight zone of growing up and being grown, connecting with his twentysomething post-college audience with raw honesty, humor, and hope.

Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451683405
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

Author: Robert Anton Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781561840809
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Here are images of our culture's absurdities, injustices, violence and desires, shot at you in a machine gun like assault on your senses and intellect. A hilarious, chilling and irrevocably mind-altering, - a left brain/right-brain challenge...a conscious-raising experience filled with laughter, rage -- and truth.