Digital Philosophy

The progress in the field of computers in addition to improving our lives, is also helping to better understand the universe .
Understanding the logic of computing and information is changing the way we look at the universe
from the philosophical point of view and is helping us to better understand the physical laws that form the basis of cosmology .

Digital-physical realities are part of our daily spatial experiences, interacting seamlessly to allow multiple streams of information to converge upon us. The Actual acts as a place of affected engagement within our surrounding environment, which can interact with the virtuality of our everyday life. Digital-physical experiences happen within these environments and are affected by our identity, corporeal body and virtual body allowing us to question the possibilities and outcomes of the world we inhabit.

How we interact with these digital-physical spatial encounters is where my research lies; using technological interventions including gaming, second life, screens and interfaces I look to expand on the affective qualities these environments hold. While also exploring the language we use to describe the space we inhabit when presented with our identities within the shared digital-physical space or convergence.

This paper presents an understanding of consciousness based on Bantu cosmology. The author's motivation is to discuss consciousness in a new light. The writer has included some stories that he heard and events he witnessed during his childhood. In Bantu cosmology, the universe is governed by souls or spirits (taken here as consciousness). These are found in all elements of the universe: in trees, stones, wind, animals, and human beings, etc. The author argues that this idea is worth investigating to assess whether the Bantu understanding of consciousness can provide a better understanding of physical theories concerning consciousness.

Magnum Opus of digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, philosophy of mind, the technological singularity, the impending phase transition of humanity, transcendental metaphysics and God.  In one volume, the author covers it all: from quantum physics to your experiential reality, from the Big Bang to the Omega Point, from the 'flow state' to psychedelics, from 'Lucy' to the looming AI Singularity, from natural algorithms to the operating system of your mind, from geo-engineering to nanotechnology, from anti-aging to immortality technologies, from oligopoly capitalism to Star-Trekonomics, from the Matrix to Universal Mind, from Homo sapiens to Holo syntellectus.

This is an essential read in digital physics, foundations of quantum physics, science of consciousness, philosophy of mind, physics of time, digital philosophy, economic theory, cybernetics and AI research, collective evolution and self-development in the Information Age.  Despite a dozen of neologisms, readily explained by given definitions and contextually, the book is an exceptionally easy read for an intellectual reader. Alongside with the Syntellect Hypothesis, as the author's main contribution to the scientific and philosophical dialogue, you'll encounter the Conscious Instant Hypothesis and the Temporal Singularity, Experiential Realism and the Mental Universe Hypothesis in regards to our phenomenological experience; the Noocentric Model challenging the centuries-old Copernican heliocentric model; the Chrysalis Conjecture as his solution to the Fermi Paradox; D-theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, as his fresh perspective on temporal ontology and the physics of time; the mind-bending Digital Pantheism Argument, Exponential Evolution, and the Omega Point Cosmo-Teleology.

In order to understand the Universe completely and achieve Theory of Everything we must understand how our consciousness experiences and understands all objects in the Universe in general. The aim of the project is to synthesize philosophy, mathematics, physics, information theory, language and cognitive science into a single architectonic framework or system of our reason itself and to model the original synthetic unity of apperception -the framework within which all our thoughts, knowledge and experience is produced.

The concept of "life" certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties-reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to experimental philosophy of science and concept explication. We apply topic-modeling algorithms to identify which specific properties are attributed to a target set of entities (bacteria, archaea, viruses, prions, plasmids, phages and the molecule of adenine). Eight major clusters of properties were identified together with their relative relevance for each target entity (two that relate to metabolism and catalysis, one to genetics, one to evolvability, one to structure, and-rather unexpectedly-three that concern interactions with the environment broadly construed). While aligning with intuitions-for instance about viruses being less alive than bacteria-these quantitative results also reveal differential degrees of performance that have so far remained elusive or overlooked. Taken together, Beyond categorical definitions of life: a data-driven approach to assessing lifeness 2 these analyses provide a conceptual "lifeness space" that makes it possible to move away from a categorical construal of life by empirically assessing the relative lifeness of more-or-less alive entities.

My MA thesis - an intellectual history of Wikipedia told through its shared lineage with the encyclopedism of both the Enlightenment and early digital culture.

Using Wikipedia’s encyclopedia articles, their sources, and the internal array of policies and editorial guidelines governing their creation, I offer a review of the online encyclopedia. I trace its origins back to the French encyclopedists and the so-called republic of letters and invisible college, and show how many of the intellectual pretenses of print-based Enlightenment found new form in the early digital discourse. I show how the distinctly encyclopedic potential attributed to computers, hypertext systems and the internet through the so-called internet imaginaire and network ideology directly birthed Wikipedia, its technology and its editorial community. Wikipedia’s encyclopedic culture, I will claim, makes use of amateurs for distinctly scientific ends, enforcing not just academic standards but actually emulating data-driven scientific culture and values through what I term “citizen encyclopedists” and “professional” Wikipedian scientists.

Die Digitalisierung prägt und transformiert unser alltägliches Leben zunehmend; eine digitale Lebenswelt entsteht. Sie ist  in ihrer Komplexität nicht mehr rein technik- oder medienphilosophisch zu verstehen, sondern bedarf eigener «Kategori- en der Digitalität», die in diesem Essay entwickelt werden.  Dazu grenzt sich der Autor von spekulativen Positionen ab, welche die Entwicklung der Digitalisierung derart aufl aden, dass daraus utopische Science-Fiction-Szenarien werden. Denn die digitale Lebenswelt sollte nicht nur als eine technologische  Innovation verstanden werden, sondern als eine neue ontologi-sche Struktur, die es philosophisch zu erkunden und zu begreifen  gilt.

L'avvento dell'era digitale sta avendo conseguenze enormi sulle nostre vite. Siamo oramai sempre più " connessi " in rete, accessibili ovunque, dipendenti dal funzionamento della rete nello sbrigare una moltitudine di attività quotidiane che fino a poco tempo fa espletavamo in maniera del tutto diversa: dalla ricerca di indicazioni stradali, al reperimento di notizie utili a orientare le nostre scelte, da quelle più banali come scegliere un ristorante o un albergo, a quelle più importanti, riguardanti noi stessi come singoli – la comprensione dei sintomi di un qualche malessere fisico o psichico che ci affligge, la scelta di un medico, di un partner o della scuola o dell'Università in cui iscrivere i nostri figli – e come membri di una collettività – quale partito votare, quale candidato eleggere, ecc. Internet è ormai parte integrante del modo in cui lavoriamo. Per prendere solo uno tra i molti esempi possibili, il nostro mestiere di intellettuali è profondamente diverso da come era fino a non molto tempo fa: la frequentazione di biblioteche è ormai obsoleta, possiamo impartire e seguire corsi a distanza, nonché svolgere, a distanza, molti dei nostri compiti istituzionali – dal ricevimento studenti, agli esami e alle riunioni collegiali –. La nostra identità sociale, inoltre, è ormai inevitabilmente legata al web: le nostre " amicizie " , la nostra appartenenza a gruppi professionali, sociali, politici, sono in gran parte determinate dalla nostra presenza on-line. La nostra reputazione in generale, e come intellettuali in particolare, oggigiorno dipende sempre più dalla nostra presenza on-line e dalla rete di rapporti che vi intratteniamo. Chi, come molti tra i lettori di questo Nodi, non è un nativo digitale, sa che cosa c'era prima dell'avvento dell'era digitale e, sebbene a volte possa sentirsi sorpassato dai tempi, può fare confronti, nonché svolgere certe mansioni ed eventualmente risolvere problemi anche in assenza della connessione alla rete. I nativi digitali, invece, si trovano in una situazione molto diversa: la scrittura manuale è sempre meno praticata; forse, un giorno non troppo lontano, non sarà più insegnata; la lettura e lo studio si fanno on-line o su strumenti elettronici che se, da un lato, consentono rapidi collegamenti ipertestuali, dall'altro non permettono l'utilizzo della memoria visiva nel reperimento delle informazioni in un testo, rendono la lettura veloce e superficiale, e la parola scritta, priva di immagini, video, colonne sonore, noiosa. Le capacità attentive, quindi, sono inevitabilmente diverse. La memoria, inoltre, è sempre meno necessaria, perché si può far conto sulla " memoria estesa " , cioè una serie di strumenti che ci permettono di immagazzinare informazioni, facilmente reperibili ovunque ci troviamo. La lettura di mappe cartacee, la ricerca su un dizionario o un'enciclopedia in ordine alfabetico, sono, probabilmente, competenze in via di estinzione, rese superflue dall'avvento di strumenti digitali sempre disponibili on-line. D'altro canto, l'abilità nell'uso degli strumenti digitali diventa sempre più richiesta, visto che è ciò che serve, ormai, a pilotare aerei, e anche droni e a manovrare complessi strumenti tecnologicamente avanzati utilizzati in ogni ambito della vita umana, dalla sala operatoria ai siti bellici. Tale abilità richiede una destrezza manuale che a molti fa difetto, ma anche un modo di filtrare l'informazione visiva e di agire a distanza che a loro volta dipendono da capacità cognitive complesse e non egualmente presenti nella popolazione. Di ciò faccia fede il fatto che l'Università della California a Irvine ha deciso di puntare moltissimo sul reclutamento di matricole che si distinguono negli e-games, agevolandone l'iscrizione con un lauto numero di cospicue borse di studio. Le implicazioni sociali, politiche, pedagogiche ed etiche dell'avvento dell'era digitale sono evidentemente enormi, ma in questo Nodi ci concentreremo su quelle epistemiche. Vale a dire quelle riguardanti il modo in cui

Since this paper (extended abstract) is rejected by anonymous reviewers, this is its final version. I apologize for its rough and unfinished form, but this author cannot continue this work. If you are curious what Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory and David Deutsch’s Universal Constructor looks like, read it anyway. Feel free to use it in parts or entirety for your paper if you are in the mood to do that. Not a single word on the topic will be added by Aleksandar Malečić. Have a nice day.

The following review explores Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE) in terms of comparative philosophy, supporting IIE as the most relevant and significant development of the field of Information Ethics (IE). The focus of the review is threefold. First, it will review the core presumption of the field of IIE, that being the demand for an inter- mission in the pursuit of a founding philosophy for IE in order to first address the philosophical biases of IE by western philosophy. Second, a history of the various philosophical streams of IIE will be outlined, including its literature and pioneering contributors. Lastly, a new synthesis of comparative philosophies in IIE will be offered, looking towards a future evolution of the field. Examining the interchange between contemporary information ethicists regarding the discipline of IIE, the review first outlines the previously established presumptions of the field of IIE that posit the need for an IE as grounded in western sensibilities. The author then addresses the implications of the foregoing presumption from several non-western viewpoints, arguing that IIE does in fact find roots in non-western philosophies as established in the concluding synthesis of western and eastern philosophical traditions.

[English abstract] This article reflects on the modelization of texts of our cultural heritage in the current very early phase of Digital Philology by asking the question: what "form" are we forcing upon our texts? I explore three ways in which our textual models reflect our cultural and technologicalbias: first, the OHCO hierarchical model behind TEI XML; second, the sequential alphabetical model based on Western print, lying behind Unicode. A third aspect has been less explored in the scholarly discussion: citation protocols such as CITE/CTS are based on specific corpora. For example, the canonic corpora for classical Greek and Latin texts are TLG and PHI 5.3. Each of those corpora freezes author identification, authorship attribution, text boundaries, paragraph and line numbering in a specific canonic form. A dilemma arises: on the one side, interoperability requires that CTS URIs are based on a fixed textual canon, which hinders scholarly modifications of that canon; on the other side, the principles of philology suggest that URIs point to specific versions of texts, which in its turn cripples the interoperability potential of the protocol.

[Italian abstract] L'articolo costituisce una riflessione sulla modellizzazione dei testi appartenenti alla nostra tradizione culturale in questa fase aurorale della Filologia Digitale e parte dalla domanda: che "forma" stiamo dando ai nostri testi? Vengono asplorati tre aspetti per cui i nostri modelli testuali riflettono i nostri presupposti culturali e tecnologici: in primo luogo, il modello gerarchico OHCO che sta alla base di TEI XML; in secondo luogo, il modello sequenziale alfabetico basato sulla stampa delle lingue occidentali, che sta alla base di Unicode. Un terzo aspetto, poi, è il meno esplorato nella ricerca: protocolli per la citazione testuale come CITE/CTS sono basati su corpora specifici. Per esempio, i corpora canonici per i testi greci e latini classici sono il TLG e il PHI 5.3. Ciascuno di questi corpora fissa in una forma canonica l'identificazione degli autori, l'attribuzione delle opere, la delimitazione dei testi, la numerazione di porzioni testuali come paragrafi e versi. Ne scaturisce un dilemma: da una parte, l'interoperabilità richiede che gli URI CTS siano basati su un canone testuale fisso, il che tende ad ostacolare le modifiche al canone da parte dei filologi; d'altra parte, i principi della filologia suggeriscono che gli URI puntino a versioni specifiche dei testi, il che però riduce il potenziale di interoperabilità del protocollo.

Meta Math! in Italian.

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Synopsis –

Tutta la scienza d’Occidente poggia sulla matematica, ma sin dagli anni Trenta i matematici sono divenuti penosamente consapevoli del fatto che la loro disciplina soffre di serie limitazioni. Lo ha messo in luce per la prima volta il teorema di incompletezza di Kurt Gödel: ogni sistema assiomatico formale contiene enunciati veri non dimostrabili all’interno del sistema stesso. Gregory Chaitin ne ha ampliato il concetto, sostenendo che vi sono molte condizioni dove le verità non possono essere dimostrate da alcuna regola a priori. «Gödel ha rivelato solo la punta dell’iceberg: ci sono infiniti teoremi che non possono essere dimostrati da nessun sistema finito di assiomi» spiega il matematico, che ha trovato nel numero Omega il concetto chiave per confermare l’incompletezza della sua scienza. Omega ha preso forma quando Chaitin si è provato a calcolare la probabilità che un programma informatico prima o poi si fermi (il famoso problema della fermata di Alan Turing) e si è reso conto che tale numero ha un valore perfettamente definito ma non potrà mai essere calcolato: è irriducibile. Il motivo conduttore della lucida argomentazione di Chaitin è dato dalla nozione di complessità, già anticipata da Leibniz. Il migliore dei mondi possibili, infatti, non è quello ottimistico in cui «tutto è bene», ma quello, ben più interessante, che «è a un tempo il più semplice quanto a ipotesi e il più ricco di fenomeni». L’intelligibilità del mondo – della fisica come della mente – presuppone la possibilità di operare compressioni algoritmiche (riduzioni della complessità). In fisica, e in genere nelle scienze della natura, gli scienziati «comprimono» le loro osservazioni in leggi, e mostrano come dedurre da esse le osservazioni. I matematici «comprimono» i loro esperimenti computazionali in assiomi, e mostrano come dedurre da essi i teoremi. Questa analogia apre la via a una concezione della matematica come scienza empirica, un rovesciamento di prospettiva che assurge a nuovo paradigma: anziché ricercare nuove prove di coerenza, si tratterà di arricchirne i contenuti per tentativi.

The question of what kind of knowledge videogames can give to players can be treated in different ways; it might be understood as trying to give a pedagogical significance to videogames or as trying to “read too much” in them. But is a deeply philosophical question: some tracts of videogames can help in shed a light on important themes for our contemporaneity. This paper wants to accept such challenge by looking at what videogames, as a peculiar form of both artistic and cultural expression and technological capability of our western and westernized contemporaneity, can say about the problems arising in the transhumanist and posthumanist debate.
The first part of the paper will focus on the evolutions of AIs and simulations. Complex contemporary games challenge the player, or try to do so, with a constantly refined simulation of “real-life” situations, consolidating the idea that AIs can be tied to the narrative [Gervás et al. 2006]. Enemies, environment, events that the player encounter demand more and more processing power both to work as intended and to be graphically rendered. Being ahead of technology in this field means to offer more exciting challenges to the player, more interesting situations, and an overall sense of realism that helps enhance what a player can learn from a complex environment like a videogame [Bavelier et al. 2012]. It seems that we can start to speak of an “epistemology of AIs”, as in how an artificial intelligence gain knowledge of its surroundings, by looking at videogames. Enemies are starting to learn from the player’s action, programming makes the environment change according to the player’s decision, games respond in what seems more realistic than artificial, redefining “uncanny valley’s” limits and proposing videogames as “testing ground” for virtual intelligent systems [Damer 2012]. While a perfect result has not yet been achieved even in the so-called open world games, the evolution is there and it poses interesting theoretical questions. How players react to the programming, under the light of Information Philosophy, can give elements to understand how technology integrate in the world of the Human – and a conscious analysis of this dimension is necessary in order to understand contemporary dimensions, as for example in drone warfare [Grayson 2014], that popular opinion tie with videogames in a pejorative sense [Cole et al. 2010]. Moreover, the sense of immersion that allows a gamer to feel part of the game’s world [Björk and Holopainen 2005, 206; Calleja 2011; Di Letizia 2014, 200-223] can help in imagine how relationship with AIs might develop in the future in a deeper, existential way.
But the developing of this second point, more existential and sociological at the same time, needs an intermission to better understand the focus. In fact, it must be said that while videogames as an expressive form can be subject of a philosophical inquiry, I believe that more theoretical questions can be inspired only by those videogames that fulfil the characteristic of a Multimedia Interactive Opera, or MIO: an art piece proper of the digital age, thanks to the peculiar quality of the existential relation expressed both in interaction through gameplay and interaction between players, a definition that plants its roots firmly in the ground of aesthetics but whose trunk and branches are ontological and phenomenological in nature. The most interesting questions arise from those videogames that can be considered as symbols according to Raimon Panikkar’s thought: mediator elements between subjective perception and logical analysis and a “cloud of unknowing” formed by different stories, traditions, and cultural references. Symbols are pure relation between meaning, vehicle and subject, impossible to be discerned in its parts without its destruction, fertile in the ontological determination of a τόδε τι as a constant dynamic movement of interrelations [Panikkar 2008, 239-274]. It can then be said that in certain videogames with a heavy authorial direction narrative and gameplay elements concur to provide a fertile ground for philosophical inquiry towards contemporary social issues [Frasca 2001; Accordi Rickards and Padula 2012].
Such is the case for Deus Ex series and Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth. The problems of the future of the Human is deeply ingrained in these games, more than other videogames, albeit from different points of view. The final part of this paper will focus on these videogames and the questions they present, in order to examine them as thought experiments that can give information on what our world might become. Differences in narrative and gameplay styles will be cardinal for the argument. Deus Ex focuses on a direct narration where the player’s choices have an impact on both story development and ending. Here, the saga created by Warren Spector has a story to tell, and manages to do so thanks to gameplay immersion and poignant narrative. The latest two instalments of the series build up questions that, while are already answered in the first chapter, are deeply enthralling and pertains to philosophy’s core interests: what does it mean to be Human? Human enhancement is a helpful technology or gives a selected few the power to dominate others? While the game’s narration already has an answer, its gameplay gives the player space to explore the alternatives. Sid Meier took a different path: Beyond Earth, being a strategic game, does not have much in terms of narration but it presents a world. Here, the indirect narration of a lore expressed through building, units, and technologies descriptions tells of the Great Mistake, the Seeding, the quest of the Human for a new place to live, where to atone for its past sins - or to repeat them.

Globalization via the digital age is upon us, demanding a new ethics and an intercultural awareness while the dialectics of globalism and cyberspace mandate a committed reflection on what the synthesis between the digital realm and global citizenship entails. In many ways, the borders that previously separated us as citizens physically and culturally have begun to dissipate, replaced by a call for an intercultural accountability and a form of global citizenship that, on one hand, surpasses borders, patriotism, and nationalism alike, but while on the other, demands an understanding and respect for the cultural idiosyncrasies among us, acknowledging the unique existential paradox of universal citizenship that posits each of us as both stranger and citizen on a commonly shared globe.

What is cosmopolitan in the digital age? Is a global digital citizen the same as merely a digital citizen? While talk of digital citizenship has increased in recent years, usually centered on a capitalist drive, encouraging a full electronic participation in society and a responsibility to digital commerce, many questions remain unanswered.  Is the netizen the citizen of a democratic state, and of digital democracy? As a citizen of the world interacting online, how will one’s “rights” and “duties” be determined? And are these “rights” universal, and in such a case, what does “universal” mean? What are the legal parameters of netizenship, and what will they be as globalization further takes hold? Is democracy critical to citizenship, or is it not? What are the political landscapes of global citizenship in the digital age? And last of all, is the concept of digital citizenship even tangible? Is it real?

Das Phänomen der Digitalisierung ist erst seit kurzem in den Fokus der geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung gerückt, nachdem es in breiten Teilen der Gesellschaft Fuß gefasst hat. Philip Specht, Autor des Buches „Die 50 wichtigsten Themen der Digitalisierung“, vertritt die These, die Digitalisierung werde uns „mit der wohl größten zivilisatorischen Herausforderung konfrontieren, die es je zu bewältigen galt.“ (Specht 2018, 10) Sollte dies zutreffen – und vieles spricht dafür –, dann dürfen gerade auch die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften dazu nicht schweigen. Bislang gibt es noch keine Reihe, die das Phänomen der Digitalisierung aus dezidiert geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive behandelt. Hierfür soll der Begriff der „Digitalität“ im Gegensatz zum rein technischen Begriff der „Digitalisierung“ verwendet werden. Während die Digitalisierung das technische Phänomen der Umwandlung analoger in digitale Information betrifft, reflektiert die Digitalität von einer Metaebene auf diese Transformation. Sie befragt diese Transformation nach ihrer kulturellen, ästhetischen, ontologischen und ethischen Bedeutung. Die neue Metzler-Reihe soll ein Forum für Analysen dieses Phänomens aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven der Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften bieten.