Bertrand du Castel 
Timothy M. JurgensenPRESS
COMPUTER THEOLOGY |
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Bibliography [1] R.
A. Bartel, Designing Virtual Worlds, New Riders, 2003. [2] http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/mud-history.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:MU%2A_games [4] J.
Dibbell, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, Owl Books,
1999. First published as “Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian
Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a
Society, The Village Voice, December 1993.) [5] S.
Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon
and Schuster, 1995. (Also
cataloged as Beyond Dreams and Beasts). [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs [7] E.
Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games,
The [8] http://www.secondlife.com/ [9] M.
Rymaszewski, W. J. Au, M. Wallace and C. Winters, Second Life: The Official Guide, Sybex, 2006.
The social
ecosystems considered in Guthery’s essay derived from computer games and game playing.
These in turn are derivative environments of non-computer interactions. Such
systems have progressed to the level of displaying a rather seamless interface
with other social ecosystems. We find the term “synthetic” as suggested by
Edward Castonova to be an interesting recognition of this seamless interface.
The term seems particularly appropriate given that these social systems
actually encompass their own virtual physical ecosystems. This tends to set
them apart, albeit perhaps only slightly from the other social ecosystems that
we’ve considered through the course of this book. It would appear, or course,
that just as with the semantic Web, the interaction model that we’ve considered
seems entirely appropriate. Recursion
We began this
chapter with a brief consideration of prayer as a model for social interaction.
The characteristic of prayer that makes for such an interesting model is the
concept of the interaction existing and occurring within a social ecosystem. At
a higher level, constraints can be specified that apply to interactions, from a
trust infrastructure in a governance relationship to a policy infrastructure.
This extends a recursive application of trust and policy. This seems rather
common to us today, but tracing the characteristic back some thousand years to
early instances of its use is perhaps not so well appreciated So, we come to a
pausing point, if not the end of our consideration of the parallels of human
evolutionary development with that of computer systems. In the course of these
considerations, we have noted the importance of recursion in a variety of
mechanisms associated with the evolutionary development of the human species;
in truth, with all living species. One can find recursion in the evolutionary process itself; in the feedback loop comprised of the introduction of change into the basic structural blueprint of a living organism and the natural |
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© Midori Press, LLC, 2008. All rights reserved for all countries. (Inquiries) The contents of ComputerTheology: Intelligent Design of the World Wide Web are presented for the sole purpose of on-line reading to allow the reader to determine whether to purchase the book. Reproduction and other derivative works are expressly forbidden without the written consent of Midori Press. Legal deposit with the US Library of Congress 1-33735636, 2007.
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ComputerTheology Intelligent Design of the World Wide Web Bertrand du Castel and Timothy M. Jurgensen Midori Press, Austin Texas 1st Edition 2008 (468 pp) ISBN 0-9801821-1-5 |
Book available at Midori Press (regular) |