RICCARDO MANZOTTI: WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY MADE OF?
June 4 2020
10.00 - 12.00
Microsoft Teams
Or, the phenomenology of computer-generated experience. What do we experience when we play in a video game? Is it a real artificial world or is it a mental world? What is the stuff virtual reality is made of? The problem of consciousness is infamously difficult and it has been at the center of both AI and philosophy of mind. Ever since the early days of cybernetics, the founders of AI and the information age - eg., Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky - have wondered about the question posed by the novelist Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a question that is now at the core of the current new wave of AI (deep learning, big data, Artificial General Intelligence). What is our experience made of? Can it be recreated by a machine? What is the ghost in the shell, if anything? Recent entrepreneurs and IT visionaries are wondering about the next revolution and whether it will allow stepping into a completely artificial reality - the massive simulation hypothesis as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil have envisaged. This talk will outline the foundations of the problem of experience in AI, philosophy, and neuroscience and will address its applications in the world of videogames and virtual reality. Riccardo Manzotti has a PhD in Robotics and degrees in The Philosophy of Mind and Computer Science. He teaches Psychology of Perception at IULM University, Milan, and has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT. His area of study is AI, artificial vision, perception and, above all, the meaning of consciousness.