"Virtual" used to mean something like "exactly" but now it means something like this . Essential Meaning of  virtual 1 :  very close to being something without actually being it The country is ruled by a virtual dictator. [=by someone who is not officially a dictator but who is like a dictator in every important way] Her victory is a virtual certainty. [=she almost certainly will win] The species is nearing virtual extinction. [=it is almost extinct] 2 :  existing or occurring on computers or on the Internet a virtual library virtual shopping Creeping into the science of computer systems, "virtual" became a powerful concept as early as the late 1960s. Programs were assigned "virtual memory" that "looked" like real memory but could be moved around or swapped out to disk according to the needs of the operating system. The idea grew from there, underpinning the architecture of "mainframe" computers and when I last worked fo...

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities: It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object. The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past. There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions , where one version incorporates design features of previous versions. It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler...

Virtualization is a huge topic, worthy of a dozen posts, but let me sketch it out here in the hope of making some details clear later. ARCHITECTURE I'm no fan of using computers as models of "mind". Our minds are not computers, nor do I expect that the AI dream of making a mind out of computer chips will happen any time soon. However, it is clear that both computers and minds process "information" in some broad sense of the term and we should not be surprised to find that designers of computers and "mother nature", the "designer" of our minds, have face similar problems and come up with similar solutions. COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE If you know a bit about computers, you know a bit about "virtualization" in computer design. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer manipulates a very small amount of information very quickly. This information is swapped in and out of the CPU from "on board" memory - Random Access Memory or ...