Recent weeks have seen events that are affecting people of all ages. The UW is offering free materials to help families broach big questions and feelings that may be surfacing as kids experience the current realities of sickness and isolation.

The new released in April suggests books and short videos to explore the broad questions — about loneliness and isolation, boredom, illness and death, as well as fear and uncertainty.

The Center for Philosophy for Children was established almost 25 years ago by director . She has written several books about philosophy for children, including a 2012 book for parents about ways to talk with children about their philosophical questions. Since the school closures she has continued her “philosophy in the classroom” series for elementary students over Zoom.

“The response from the parents led me to start thinking about all the questions and concerns children are having and the ways in which the center might be uniquely suited to provide some support for parents,” she said.

She developed the new resource with input from colleagues in the philosophy department and College of Education.

To use the list, she suggests parents read the stories or watch the videos and use them to inspire conversations with their children, paying attention to the questions children ask and the topics they want to pursue.

“The conceptual level of the conversations will, of course, vary with the ages of the children, but we find that often the questions children and adults of all ages ask are very similar,” Mohr Lone said.

Mohr Lone says some of her favorites from the list include the stories “”by Levi Pinfold; ““ by Wolf Erlbruch; “” by Simona Ciraolo; “” by Tony Fucile; Arnold Lobel’s story “,” and the videos “” and “.”

Many titles could overlap with suggestions from a child or family therapist, she said. But philosophers introduce the books from a unique angle.

“The approach is to follow the children’s lead in exploring the deeper questions about which they are wondering, without feeling compelled to give them answers,” she said. “Often the focus for adults is to try to allay children’s concerns, or provide answers to their questions. Our approach is to encourage children — and adults — to see that questions are often more important.”

As far as Mohr Lone knows this is the only such resource in the country. A British center is also offering to explore philosophical questions with younger people.

“I have been inspired in my conversations with children over the last month to see how deeply and honestly they are contemplating questions about loneliness and isolation, illness and death, and the uncertainties in life,” Mohr Lone said. “Talking with children gives me so much hope and confidence in the future.”

For more information, contact Mohr Lone at mohrlone@uw.edu or email info@philosophyforchildren.org.  

����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers led the three-year project to gather leading thinkers and publish a snapshot of a field that they say is rapidly gaining credibility in the scientific community.

“In the past five years or so, geoengineering has moved from the realm of quackery to being the subject of scientific research,” said co-editor , a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “We wanted to contribute to a serious intellectual discourse.”

Creating clouds over the ocean that would reflect back sunlight is the subject of a by Wood, whose research is on the interaction among air pollution, clouds and climate. He and co-author Tom Ackerman, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, look at what it would take to test the idea with a field experiment.

“I don’t want to prove it right, I just want to know if it’s feasible,” Wood said. “If you look at the projections for how much the Earth’s air temperature is supposed to warm over the next century, it is frightening. We should at least know the options. Is geoengineering feasible if there were to be what people call a ‘climate emergency’?”

Also explored in the journal issue is the idea of injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere, subject of a 2006 in Climatic Change by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and central to Seattle entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold’s proposed . Yet another idea is of ocean microbes, though Wood said preliminary tests suggest this is not as successful at drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as its proponents had originally thought.

How to govern geoengineering is a topic of hot debate. In one , U.K. authors flesh out the so-called , which suggest how geoengineering could be regulated as a global public good. The five principles described in the paper concern the research, publication, assessment and deployment of geoengineering techniques.

Many of the authors spoke at the UW during a , and more attended a 2012 workshop where they developed their paper ideas.

While discussions were civil, Wood said, the contributors didn’t all agree. A UW philosopher questions whether geoengineering can even be described in the Oxford Principles as a global public good.

“Just spraying sulfates into the stratosphere is not the kind of thing that necessarily benefits everyone, so in that sense it seems a mistake to call it a global public good,” said co-editor , a UW philosophy professor who has written a book on ethics and climate change. There are decisions about how to conduct sulfate spraying, he writes, and potential tradeoffs between short-term benefits and long-term risks.

Gardiner also questions whether something should be done in people’s benefit but without their permission, and if accepting geoengineering as a necessary evil ignores other science or policy options.

He’s not the only social scientist to be looking at climate issues.

“A lot of people, from across the academy, are getting interested in the Anthropocene – the idea that we may have entered a new geological era where human influence is a dominant feature, and what that means for various issues,” Gardiner said.

The collection aims to prompt a serious academic discussion the editors say has so far been lacking.

“It’s an interdisciplinary discussion with an emphasis on the research angle – whether and how we should be researching geoengineering,” said co-editor Lauren Hartzell-Nichols, a UW lecturer in philosophy. “We hope it helps people think about this issue in a more interdisciplinary and integrated way.”

The seminars and workshop that led to the issue’s creation were supported by the UW College of the Environment.

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For more information, contact Wood at 206-543-1203 or robwood@atmos.washington.edu and Gardiner at 206-221-6459 or smgard@uw.edu.

The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a published in Philosophical Quarterly by , a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:

• The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.
• Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history.
• We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

He also held that “the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But the UW team has suggested tests that can be performed now, or in the near future, that are sensitive to constraints imposed on future simulations by limited resources.

Currently, supercomputers using a technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics and starting from the fundamental physical laws that govern the universe can simulate only a very small portion of the universe, on the scale of one 100-trillionth of a meter, a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, said , a UW physics professor.

Eventually, more powerful simulations will be able to model on the scale of a molecule, then a cell and even a human being. But it will take many generations of growth in computing power to be able to simulate a large enough chunk of the universe to understand the constraints on physical processes that would indicate we are living in a computer model.

However, Savage said, there are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum.

The supercomputers performing lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations essentially divide space-time into a four-dimensional grid. That allows researchers to examine what is called the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature and the one that binds subatomic particles called quarks and gluons together into neutrons and protons at the core of atoms.

“If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge,” Savage said. Then it would be a matter of looking for a “signature” in our universe that has an analog in the current small-scale simulations.

Savage and colleagues of the University of New Hampshire, who collaborated while at the UW’s , and Zohreh Davoudi, a UW physics graduate student, suggest that the signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.

In a , an online archive for preprints of scientific papers in a number of fields, including physics, they say that the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do.

“This is the first testable signature of such an idea,” Savage said.

If such a concept turned out to be reality, it would raise other possibilities as well. For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.

“Then the question is, ‘Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?'” she said.

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For more information, contact Savage at 206-543-7481 or mjs5@uw.edu; or Davoudi at 206-543-9310 or davoudi@uw.edu.