ABSTRACT
One of the reasons for the typical incredulous cocktail-party response to any mention of philosophy and computer science in the same breath is that computer scientists are often thought to labor exclusively in a world of bits and bytes, or logic circuits and microprocessors, while philosophers are concerned with knowledge and reality in a world inhabited by people, tables, and other observable objects, as well as loftier objects of inquiry like minds, reason, truth, and beauty. Indeed, the foundational concepts of computer science are described in the language of binary arithmetic and logic gates, but it is a fascinating aspect of the discipline that the levels of abstraction that one can lay upon this foundational layer are limitless, and provide the ability to model familiar objects and processes of every day life entirely within a digital world. When digital models are sufficiently faithful to the real thing, we call the environments which they inhabit virtual worlds. So today, of course, we have virtual libraries (made possible by the Internet), virtual shopping malls (made possible by the World Wide Web), virtual communities (made possible by e-mail and chat rooms), and even virtual persons, like the digital version of actor Alan Aida created in an episode of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers 1
