About Gil Markle
Gilbert Scott Markle received his B.S. in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in 1961, a Doctorat d'université from the University
of Paris in 1963, where he studied on a Fulbright grant, and a
PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1968.
He later taught philosophy for several years at Clark University, in
Worcester, Massachusetts.
Dr. Markle was the founder of the
American Leadership Study Groups, a sponsor of overseas study
trips for high school students, and a successor company called
passports. Gil Markle also owned and operated Long View
Farm, a countryside rock 'n' roll recording studio, for many
years.
While at Yale as a graduate student, Markle wrote on the "mind-body
problem," asking (after J.J.C. Smart and others) if empirical advances
in the realm of neurophysiology
might not bring it about one day that we should be willing to talk about
thoughts and sensations as being nothing over and above brain processes;
or, more generally, states of the central nervous system. Markle
studied under the iconoclastic conceptual revisionist, Dr. Norwood Russell
Hanson, until Hanson died in the crash of his pet World War II fighter
airplane, and subsequently under Markle's friend and conceptual disciplinarian,
Dr. Rulon Wells.
In Virtual Reality!, Dr. Markle has gone a step further, suggesting
that thoughts and sensations may one day be created and manipulated
entirely by machines, creating "realities" for their owners indistinguishable
from the "real thing," and threatening the notion of the "real thing"
in more general terms, including that embraced by professional
philosophers in the perennial tradition.
Virtual Reality! first appeared in 1993 on Compuserve™, in its
Cyberforum, "Building Realities," and has since been extensively
downloaded by students, teachers, and practitioners of reality simulation.
E-mail: philo@passports.com