Philo and Economics activites in SL during spring 2010

Hi!
I have been spending a great deal of my SL time in Philosophy House (PH) camp fire. Usually the discussion there is just general chit chat, sometimes not too interesting at all, but every now and then a good philosophy topic comes up and then the conversation can be engaging. But the main attraction of PH has been that there is always people, pretty much 24/7. A problem from a discussion point of view is that the chat format tends to limit how much "room" there is in the local chat window to justify your arguments. If you are not a really fast typist, the topic often tends to fade away, before you have time to get all your ideas visible - or like in my case, I come up with the all the best replies only too late, after the topic has changed already =). Of course at the same time, that is the appeal of chatting as well: The fast pace of interaction, makes it feel like a real life conversation except the strength with the text format can temporarily support several parallel threads going on at the same time.

So now there are a couple of web forums associated to PH or the crowd that comes there regularly. The idea is to offer a forum for a more slow paced discussion. Brinn Bedlam started a "traditional" internet discussion forum for PH in http://www.thephilosophyhouse.com where the idea is to allow people to write longer posts. Many of the PH regulars, that I recognize, seem to have made posts there already.

I have been planning to go even further and start an internet journal for longer article-like essays, like the some of the posts I have had in this blog. The PH journal is not officially public yet, but you can take a sneak preview at http://phjournal.ning.com. In order for PH Journal to be a real philosophical journal, there is an editorial policy. Even though there are no strict guidelines for format, the expectation is that the citations would be referenced and arguments justified. If you take a look, I'd be grateful for all feedback how you think it looks like through the phjournal mail.

I have also been active in pursuing the investigation of "Quantum theory of Economics" (QTE) in SL workshop and I have had some amazing contributors this year. During the workshop it turned out rather soon, that the idea wasn't quite so radical than I had thought in my blog in March =) It appears that there are quite many research groups working with more or less similar kind of ideas already. However applying quantum formalism to macroscopic interactions is still a very fresh approach and the field is very open for all new mathematical and formally sound theories. A new workshop around QTE, business interactions and microeconomics will now start within Tothica SL group (see for example http://www.tothicasl.net). The idea is to discuss qualitatively microeconomics and specifically how business comes into being as a result of human interactions and external circumstances (QTE apporach) and how that creates economy in general. The workshop will also have a Ning forum at http://qteconomics.ning.com, where I will gradually copy all the material from the previous QTE workshop in SL. The moderated discussions will be held in the Library of Clemson University Dev sim. For notices of exact location and time of the workshop's SL session, join the Tothica group. They have great Philo discussions and other meetings, too...and costs nothing to join!

Hope to see you not just inworld but also at all the new and fancy associated web 2.0 Ning forums!

Merry approaching christmas season
Quin