Short Answers
Section 1: Very Short Answer (1-2 sentences)
1. What are the three posits of our intuitive conception of reality?
2. What is the difference between a simulated world and a virtual reality?
3. What do simulated worlds and virtual realities have in common?
4. For a mind/brain to be embodied is for it to be connected to a body in the right way. Can an envatted being be considered embodied? If so, how?
5. If we are in a world whose substrate is code, but the mind-body hypothesis is true, are we sims or envatted beings? Why?
Section II: Short Answer (2-3 Sentences)
6. What is Chalmers’s Creation Hypothesis, and how does it relate to religious/theistic worldviews?
7. What is the difference between Dennett’s first scenario and Putnam’s Brain-in-a-Vat (an envatted being)?
8. Explain how the Computational Theory of Mind would work if Cartesian dualism were true.
9. Name one difference between The Matrix in the movie and the sort of “Matrix” considered in philosophy (e.g. Chalmers)?
10. Schneider’s ‘augmentation’ example is supposed to support the idea that computational continuity is sufficient for persistence. What is computational continuity, and how is it’s being a sufficient condition for persistence supported by augmentation?
Section III: Medium Length Answer (4-5 sentences)
11. Explain Bostrom’s argument for why we are likely sims in a simulated world. In your answer, you should explain i) Bostrom’s trilemma (what he calls A, B, and C), and ii) why Bostrom thinks it is not just possible but likely that we are sims.
12. Pretend Jeremy is a Brain-in-a-vat in San Bernardino in the base world. In the virtual world he inhabits, however, he is in Riverside. Where is he according to Chalmers’s a) skeptical hypothesis and b) Metaphysical/Matrix hypothesis, and why do those hypotheses give the results they do?
13. Using Dennett’s first scenario (where a brain remotely controls a body), explain how neither the claim that you are located with your brain, or you are located with your body renders a satisfactory conclusion.
14. Suppose computational continuity is the correct theory of persistence (you persist if something computationally continuous with you exists at a later time) AND that the mind-body identity theory is true (minds=brains). Can you persist as a cybnernetic being? How?