ANTHROPIC SELECTION EFFECTS: POSSIBLE “LIFE” WORLD SCENARIO’S AND “BEING NO ONE…..”

By TIM CLARK

Anthropic Entity¹

Anthropic Entity(s) ²

Anthropic Entity(s) ³

Recent trends have made it clear that simulation model fidelity and complexity will continue to increase dramatically in the coming decades. For example, the beginning of the mission to build a simulated brain is already announced (Graham-Rowe, 2005). Using intelligent agents in simulation models is based on the idea that it is possible to represent the behavior of active entities in the world with their own operational autonomy. . . . The factors that may affect decision making of agents, such as personality, emotions, and cultural backgrounds, can also be embedded in agents. . . Abilities to make agents intelligent include anticipation, understanding, learning, and communication in natural and body language. Abilities to make agents trustworthy as well as assuring the sustainability of agent societies include being rational, responsible, and accountable. These lead to rationality, skillfulness, and morality (e.g., ethical agent, moral agent). ⁴

ZOE-PHILIA AND THE PREDICAMENT OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM

By MONIKA BAKKE

Bio-technologies produce, modify, and sustain life in forms no longer comprehensible within the traditional Western frameworks, nonetheless the distinction made by the Greeks between the two terms for life – bios and zoe – still proves to be very useful. Zoe, as Rabinow points out, ‘referred to the simple fact of being alive and applied to all living beings per se’ while bios ‘indicated the appropriate form given to a way of life of an individual or group.’ (Rabinow 2002, 15) Historically, only bios – the good life – has been considered worth philosophical attention as limited strictly to humans (although, Aristotle excluded e.g. women and slaves), while zoe as its animal other remained marginalized in the phallogocentric tradition of the West.