...lting images are continuously posted on the Web and are available to anyone with a computer. The last decade witnessed a spate of films, all conce... ...turn The Matrix It is easy to confuse the concepts of "virtual reality" and a "computerized model of reality (simulation)". The former is a sel... ...the two concepts are often confused because they are both mediated by and reside on computers. The computer is a self-contained (though not closed) ... ... doing so. This is the ominous "what if" in artificial intelligence (AI). What if a computer were to refuse to correlate its internal (virtual) real... ...he privileged one? In the visually tantalizing movie, "The Matrix", a breed of AI computers takes over the world. It harvests human embryos in la... ... representations. The payment should be either in kind (as in more ancient justice systems) or in cash (as in modern Western civilization). The ... ...certain that robots will fully and always implement the three laws? Only recursive systems are predictable in principle, though, at times, their co... ...es the Laws from a few vantage points: philosophy, artificial intelligence and some systems theories. An immediate question springs to mind: HOW wi... ...ian, Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) dealt with the completeness and consistency of logical systems. A passing acquaintance with his two theorems would have...

...ugh it emerges as a main property of the whole, as an extensive parameter of macro systems. In my doctoral dissertation (Ph.D. Thesis available on ... ...econd Law of Thermodynamics predicts the gradual energetic decay of physical closed systems ("entropy"). Arguably, the Universe as a whole is precis... ... order is often fighting disorder for dominance. In other words, in localized, open systems, order sometimes tends to increase and, by definition, ... ...to decrease. This is the orthodoxy. Personally, I believe otherwise. Some physical systems increase disorder, either by decaying or by actively spr... ...ctor can be constrained to collapse to the most order-enhancing event. If we had a computer the size of the Universe that could infallibly model it... ...accumulated databases vanish instantaneously with death. The organism is akin to a computer which processes data using elaborate software and then ... ...es its meaning (its existence as ART). The physical world, in contrast (similar to computer programmes) contains both the substrate and the operati... ...llowed Representations". They are the only ones allowed (or enabled, to borrow from computers) in the "Allowed Levels of Excitation". This is the r... ...called because they could, in principle, be performed by simple machines (or human-computers or human- calculators, to use Turing's unfortunate phra...