- Crocus City Hall attack (Wikipedia)
On 22 March 2024, at around 20:00 MSK (UTC+3), a coordinated attack occurred at the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk, Russia, on the western edge of Moscow. Four gunmen carried out a mass shooting, as well as slashing attacks on the people gathered at the venue and used incendiary devices to set the venue on fire. Investigators said the following day the attack had killed at least 133 people, with more than 100 concertgoers injured. The Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS–KP), a South-Central Asia-based regional affiliate of the Islamic State, claimed responsibility in a statement through the Amaq News Agency shortly after the attack.
- Brain in a vat (Wikipedia)
In philosophy, the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness, and meaning. It is a modernized version of René Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment, originated by Gilbert Harman. Found in many science fiction stories, it outlines a scenario in which a mad scientist, machine, or other entity might remove a person’s brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer that would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those a brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain’s own output) and the “disembodied” brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, such as those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world.