EP 337 Worldviews: Philip Rosedale on Emergent Worlds, Localism, and What Building Second Life Taught Him About Humanity

About this episode

Jim Rutt interviews Philip Rosedale about the design of virtual worlds and the nature of self and society.

Jim talks with Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab and creator of the game Second Life, about the nature of self, society, and the design of virtual worlds. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, the polycrisis and whether to work on AI or on software that helps people get along better, Philip's role-based sense of identity, his messianic feeling during Second Life's early days versus a more Zen perspective now, humanity's place in the cosmic timeline, resistance to the techie utopian view that humans are merely a stepping stone to AI, the duty to "think local" and align at the scale of immediate community, Doug Rushkoff's "team human" concept, shared objective reality as social glue, the danger that technology has reduced the coherence of our collective worldview, Jim's "minimum viable metaphysics" and the reality assumption as operationally necessary, overapplying quantum mechanics to produce anti-realist worldviews, Philip's founding vision for Second Life as an emergent system contrasted with Old Testament god-game design, Craig Reynolds' Boids flocking rules and the tattoo encoding cohesion, separation, and alignment, emergent…

People in this episode

Host: Jim Rutt

Guest: Philip Rosedale

Topics covered

• virtual worlds
• self and society
• localism
• AI and technology
• identity and expression
• emergent systems

Keywords

• Second Life
• virtual worlds
• localism
• AI
• identity
• emergent systems
• Doug Rushkoff
• collective worldview
• quantum mechanics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Linden Lab, Second Life

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