April 20, 2006. Talk on “The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul” at Fresno State. See slides .

Audio files for podcasts #17-#29 are gone, due to bit rot and unreliable hosts… Onward!

April 18, 2006. Reading “Chu and the Nants.” This story is in the June, 2006, edition of ISAAC ASIMOV’S SF magazine. It also serves as part of the first chapter of POSTSINGULAR. The reading was at The New College on Valencia St. in San Francisco, under the aegis of the “SF in SF” series of monthly readings organized by Terry Bisson and Adam Cornford.

Dec 9, 2005. My final lecture in my Philosophy and Computers class at SJSU in Fall, 2005. Based on Chapter 6 of my tome, “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.” Includes discussion of my ambivalence about how to end the book, panpsychism, ontologies, unsolvability, computational equivalence, unpredictability, undecidability, and my six principles on how to be happy. (56.46MB. 60 min.)

Dec 2, 2005. Lecture on Chapter 5 of “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul”. Flocking behaviors, how conversations can exemplify different computation classes, the hive mind of society, the nature of language, the ubiquity of social power laws. (If you want to follow the computer demos, download the “Boppers” and “CAPOW” programs from the Lifebox book site, and run these on a Windows machine.) (51.80MB. 60 min.)