Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us: (about life, philosophy and everything)

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WOULD YOU KILL ONE PERSON TO SAVE FIVE OTHERS?

If you could upload all of your memories into a machine, would that machine be you? Is it possible we're all already artificial intelligences, living inside a simulation?

These sound like questions from a philosophy class, but in fact they're from modern, popular video games. Philosophical discussion often uses thought experiments to consider ideas that we can't test in real life, and media like books, films, and games can make these thought experiments far more accessible to a non-academic audience. Thanks to their interactive nature, video games can be especially effective ways to explore these ideas.

Each chapter of this book introduces a philosophical topic through discussion of relevant video games, with interviews with game creators and expert philosophers. In ten chapters, this book demonstrates how video games can help us to consider the following questions:

1. Why do video games make for good thought experiments?
2. What can we actually know?
3. Is virtual reality a kind of reality?
4. What constitutes a mind?
5. What can you lose before you're no longer yourself?
6. Does it mean anything to say we have choice?
7. What does it mean to be a good or dutiful person?
8. Is there anything better in life than to be happy?
10. How should we be governed, for whom and by who?
11. Is it ever right to take another life? And how do we cope with our own death?