[Talk date: 14 January 2015] Playing God(s): Virtual World Creation, Online Spirituality and the Law

Crag Seminar 14 January 2015: Lecture Theatre G.03 – 5.30 pm A talk by: Burkhard Schafer Professor of Computational Legal Theory Director, SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP University of Edinburgh School of Law http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/burkhardschafer Entire session sound capture: Abstract: The creation of virtual worlds such as the popular MMOPRGs is sometimes trivialised as a […]

Radical creativity as the natural God

Reinventing the Sacred: Emerging Complexity in a Creative Cosmos Prof. Stuart Kauffman Publisher’s presentation: ‘Consider the complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awesome to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell at a stroke, or to realize that it evolved with no Almighty Hand, but arose […]

Worldbuilding: how to create a fictional universe

One question often asked when deciding to build a world for a game or novel (but especially games) is: Where to start? Usually this question is asked or steered in the direction of creating a map. Therefore popular opinion falls into two camps: Top-down: start by drawing a large scale map of the world or […]

[28 January 2015] When Groups Know More than their Members Do: The Creation of Epistemic Group Agents and the Acquisition of Collective Knowledge

Spyridon Orestis Palermos AHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Edinburgh, EIDYN Centre, Extended Knowledge Project School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences Department of Philosophy When Groups Know More than their Members Do: The Creation of Epistemic Group Agents and the Acquisition of Collective Knowledge How do groups store, share, and generate knowledge? Moreover, can groups […]

Beyond innovation | Professor Helga Nowotny | Gifford Lectures | 13 May 2015

Professor Helga Nowotny Beyond Innovation. Temporalities. Re-use. Emergence. Event details Date: Wednesday 13 May 2015, 5.30 – 7pm Venue: Business School Auditorium and Concourse, 29 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9JS Tickets are free of charge and will be available from 2 March 2015. Biography Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH […]

Bergson at the University of Edinburgh 100 years ago

In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Bergson to give the famous Gifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn. Bergson delivered the first course, consisting of eleven lectures, under the title of The Problem of Personality, at the University of Edinburgh in the spring of that year.​ The War […]

On the ‘making’ of ‘circumstances’, by Shaw

From George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession: VIVIE [sitting down with a shrug, no longer confident; for her replies, which have sounded sensible and strong to her so far, now begin to ring rather woodenly and even priggishly against the new tone of her mother] Don’t think for a moment I set myself above you […]

Churchill on the creation of reality

from My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), pp. 130-31. Winston Churchill: ‘Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. The whole creation is but a dream; all phenomena are imaginary. You […]