Philosophy

One of my pet peeves in game studies is the claim – repeated in published articles again and again – that Wittgenstein thought you can’t define games, games are impossible to define or some other variant of this idea. I’m not sure why the idea is so persistent. Perhaps game scholars have a hard time coming up with definitions and feel better when they think that an esteemed dead philosopher let them off the hook: “I’m failing to define games because Wittgenstein told me it’s impossible, not because I’m not very good at this kind of theorising.” ...

I recently came upon a philosophy paper that seemed to tackle a problem I didn’t know existed and had a convincing argument for identifying and perhaps fixing that problem. Good papers – especially good philosophy papers – are like that. They force you to look at the world in a new way, even if you don’t agree with what they say. They also tend to be easy to read without extensive knowledge of the domain they are contributing in, because they go less into the details of previous perspectives. ...

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit”, Harry Frankfurt wrote in On Bullshit (1986). In some areas of life it’s taken for granted that bullshit prevails. Marketing, for instance, may have some truth to it, but usually people treat most of what comes out of marketing departments as wistful thinking at best and outright lies at worst. Politics, too, has had a perception of having a tenuous relation to the truth. It is, for example, encapsulated in a well-known joke: ...

A computer program called Eugene Goostman has recently been said to have passed the Turing test for the first time. But what does this mean? Are we about to be replaced by robots? Maybe not (yet). As the story tells it, a machine can be said to have passed the Turing test if they can fool at least 30% of people that they are human. The test consisted of a tester chatting Eugene for five minutes and then rendering a verdict on the humanness of their chat partner. ...

Computers are built to run on metaphoric relations taken from earlier forms of technology and human experience not related to computers. An obvious example is the concept of a file, stored in a folder. That is, of course, a metaphor taken from earlier forms of organizing information in filing cabinets, when information was stored on sheets of paper instead of bits on a hard drive. ...

Since the spring of 2012, Google has started to move from search of particular combinations of letters to searching things. This move from string-based search to searching things is a move towards Google building an ontology of things. The difference with searching things instead of strings is that Google can differentiate between homonyms, things that sound the same but are different. For example, if you think about Google itself, it is both a search engine and a company. And these are two different things, with different attributes. ...