Luciano Floridi

Information flows and communicative interactions on social media, the Web and the expanding Internet of things are changing the possibilities, the actual methods and models of interaction between human beings, objects and life environments. As a result, an unprecedented landscape of structural and functional connections emerge that can be described, at least in part, in terms of connectivity graphs. In borrowing the term «connectome» from the neurosciences, the author suggests that the network-like structure emerging from the combination of the Internet of things and the human usage of social media can be regarded as a third degree connectome (connettoma-3), that is to say as a dynamic and evolutionary system that modifies the organization of the activities in the human nervous system (connettoma-1) and in the social networks defined as connectomes of connectomes (connettoma-2). To regard the infosphere as an expanding third degree connectome means to ask questions about the material structures and the dynamics of the connections to be mapped, in order to study how shared sensemaking and behaviours change or become established. From such a perspective, it is possible to resume, update and reformulate both the actor-network theory, which claims that social actors emerge in the large network of attachments to which they belong, and the question of the alternative between being free from bonds (impossible) and well-attached.

The following paper will trace the recently established field of Information Ethics through it’s various evolutions, from it’s origins in Librarianship to it’s role as a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the philosophy of information. The praxis of the field will be outlined for the uninitiated reader, followed by an intimate history of the founding players and their continued contribution to this ever-evolving field. The current evolutions of Information Ethics will then be explored in the context of their application to the viral global phenomena of Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE), and finally, the paper will conclude with projections towards future evolutions in Information Ethics, as well as an exploration of potential definitions for the field.

This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Specifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Information Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, opening out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits—axiology being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology—and the architectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in (and occasionally as) the world.

In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that structure is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indicates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semiotic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophenomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis."

While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian paradigm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it—though Deleuze is a threshold for such matters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle (as well as Patrick Wilson, Marcia Bates, and Jonathan Furner) to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the arguments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern described can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and images of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross.

Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take seriously various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, complex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial intelligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology.

El presente texto abordará una reflexión sobre la identidad digitalizada, haciendo especial énfasis en los postulados de Luciano Floridi, cuya propuesta de "infoesfera" y su análisis del ser "onlife" son cruciales para aproximarse a las tecnologías digitales y con ello la manera cómo la identidad humana es apreciada en estos ámbitos. Además, se explicará cuáles son las características más importantes de esta postura. Por último, se abordará cómo esta nueva manera de concebir la identidad se convierte en un problema ontológico para el individuo y se analizará si con ella es necesario una nueva perspectiva ontológica del ser humano, que se adecúe al modo de vida digital del siglo XXI.

The evolution of human cognition has corresponded to the technological expansion of its state-space, increasing its degrees of freedom by tracking invariances and conjunctions in its relations with the world. This process has two aspects. First, the human has progressively broken up the unified whole that was the ‘magical unity’ (Simondon) of our pre-human ancestors into convenient and workable objects of knowledge that can be named, numbered, displaced, and exchanged. This is the abstract process of discretization (Stiegler),  and it has gone step in step with hominization. Discretization corresponds to a process of dividing the world’s continuous fluxes and vague unities into ever smaller, countable parts and pieces. But there is a second, complimentary process: that of synthesis, concrescence, or integration, which has also followed the expansion of the human Umwelt. Humans have extended their criticality not only by breaking the world up into smaller pieces, but by correlating these parts according to principles of symmetry and invariance, sequence and order. It is the organism’s capacity to encapsulate, to envelop an indefinite series or to mark a horizon (Châtelet). This process can be thought of as complimentary to discretization: instead of a breaking-things-apart, it is process of enveloping, or of the constitution of a provisional whole (holon). All ‘extended critical’ systems may be said to produce such integrations corresponding to their stabilization upon a perpetual phase transition, a state of constant renormalization (Bailly and Longo). It is at the root of speculations about the eventual convergence of human knowledge upon an attractor, an omega point, or a singularity, as the ultimate end of a noölogical process. Teilhard de Chardin called this the ‘noösphere’. Beyond his speculative scheme, science and mathematics permit us to speak of a singularity of cognition and life that could also be considered noölogical. But today, the big data environment that tracks our interactions and displacements, that pulverizes the world as an abstract set of indexed variables, has been more appropriately described as an ‘infosphere’. It has been called a ‘fourth revolution’ (Floridi) in human thought, the most recent step in the Copernican displacement of the human from the world stage. Turing is held to follow Freud, Darwin and Copernicus in the infliction of yet another wound to human narcissism. It is as though the prospect of a noösphere has been displaced by that of the infosphere, as though the organism’s process of cognitive synthesis had become obsolete, replaced by the lonely acts of sampling and sequence matching, tireless iteration, measurement and calculation. The present article proposes a different framework for thinking the emergence of the infosphere: it results from human technoevolution having been nefariously overtaken by a runaway process of discretization. We problematize this line of thought from a noötechnical and ‘epistemo-aesthetic’ standpoint, by considering the shared aesthetic evolution of life, cognition and technè.

Infosfera e Sistema: cosa resta dell’umano.


Lo sviluppo e, conseguentemente, la diffusione delle tecnologie è attualmente a un tale stato d’avanzamento che persino la riflessione su di esse ne risulta influenzata; lontana da fideismi ingenui, come dai pregiudizi infondati, il pensiero contemporaneo si trova a fare i conti con l’ineliminabilità –  quando non la necessità – dei mezzi tecnologici in grado di coordinare e agevolare le prassi quotidiane di tutti gli attori coinvolti nella globalizzazione, ma anche di fronteggiare le emergenze sanitarie che sono entrate, nostro malgrado, a far parte della nostra recente esperienza collettiva. In Virus sovrano?, la speculazione di Di Cesare sulla pandemia di SARS-CoV-2, che ha colpito il mondo dall’inizio di quest’anno, si pronuncia sul governo degli esperti in termini che possono essere facilmente applicati al governo della tecnologia, quando privata della riflessione etica; leggiamo infatti:
[…] ovunque l’esperto è interpellato […]. Eppure la sua competenza non è una garanzia. Se è un depositario di un sapere specifico, e come tale va ascoltato, non è detto che abbia più esperienza e saggezza di altri. Se conosce alcuni mezzi, non necessariamente vede con lucidità i fini. Può darsi, anzi, che li veda meno di altri. L’esperto è come il timoniere di Agamennone, che riuscì a riportare a casa il suo padrone – dove però fu ucciso.
Considerando la tecnologia come un sapere specifico tra gli altri, vale quindi la pena soffermarsi sulle parole di Di Cesare e di riflettere non solo, sulla miopia dei fini intrinseca alla tecnica, ma specialmente sulle conseguenze antropologiche che questa eccedenza dei mezzi provoca nell’umanità.
Eppure, a partire dalla connessione aristotelica tra intelligenza umana e uso delle mani, per cui è solo l’uomo ad avere nella mano “lo strumento in grado di utilizzare il più gran numero di altri strumenti”  e, conseguentemente, ad essere in grado di impadronirsi – a differenza degli altri animali – del maggior numero di tecniche, molti filosofi – tra cui Adriano Palma – hanno pertinentemente osservato come l’avversione alla tecnica si tradurrebbe in una miopia equivalente a quella della tecnica, andando a criticare quell’animalità di cui l’uomo non riuscirebbe, nemmeno volendo, a liberarsi.
È chiaro che, pur rilevando e ammettendo la distanza tra i possibili punti d’osservazione, qualsiasi speculazione che voglia apportare un contributo al tema della mutazione antropologica contemporanea, per effetto della tecnica, debba nutrirsi di una letteratura sempre più specifica,  per comprendere la portata delle attuali scoperte e per collocarsi in un territorio di neutralità vigile e cosciente, ricco di interrogativi e al riparo da quelle risposte pronte a dimostrarsi insufficienti, se indagate dal punto di vista dell’operatività collettiva.
A tal proposito, il nostro contributo si presenta come una rilettura della relazione tra sistema e ambiente, analizzata da Luhmann in Sistemi sociali, alla luce del concetto di infosfera, elaborato da Floridi. Se infatti, l’ambiente non è una categoria residuale, ma il presupposto dell’identità del sistema  – anche quando si costituisce in termini differenziali – e Floridi definisce l’infosfera attuale come “l’intero ambiente informazionale costituito da tutti gli enti informazionali, le loro proprietà, interazioni, processi e reciproche relazioni”,  ma anche come “realtà” – a patto che si intenda quest’ultima in termini puramente informazionali – è chiaro fino a che punto un confronto tra i termini ci aiuterà a delineare i tratti dell’individualità contemporanea. Non meno importante: la capacità di auto-osservazione da parte di ogni sistema, ci dimostra la capacità del sistema di analizzare il rapporto che esso intrattiene con l’ambiente; poiché tale rapporto si delinea in termini di differenziazione e ha come finalità sistemica la riproduzione etopoietica, un’indagine sui caratteri dell’infosfera e sulla necessità antropologica di accompagnare eticamente lo sviluppo tecnologico sarebbe coerente alla proceduralità del sistema e, in ultima analisi, funzionale allo sopravvivenza dello stesso.

What is information? Information in the broad sense including not only digital information, but also analogue information (the whole of human culture), biological information and even physical information. For this research, the theory of three worlds of philosopher Karl Popper is the starting point. His pluralistic theory disentangles reality into three worlds: world 1 is the physical world, world 2 the world of processing and individuality, and world 3 is the autonomous world of information. A world 3, with information as a basic, distinct property of the universe, a trace from the past, stored history, retained reality. This leads to the conclusion that world 2 (mind and processing) and world 3 (stored information) should not be mixed up; storage of information is key, not the processing or transmission of information. Disentanglement of reality into three worlds creates clarity in many different fields of science and society. Considering world 3 of stored information as a separate world  of stabilized or preserved reality, will give a new perspective on many issues in contemporary philosophy, physics, natural sciences, social/cultural sciences and even artifical intelligence.

This article analyses, defines, and refines the concepts of ownership and personal data to explore their compatibility in the context of EU law. It critically examines the traditional dividing line between personal and non-personal data and argues for a strict conceptual separation of personal data from personal information. The article also considers whether, and to what extent, the concept of ownership can be applied to personal data in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). This consideration is framed around two main approaches shaping all ownership theories: a bottom-up and top-down approach. Via these dual lenses, the article reviews existing debates relating to four elements supporting introduction of ownership of personal data, namely the elements of control, protection, valuation, and allocation of personal data. It then explores the explanatory advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches in relation to each of these elements as well as to ownership of personal data in IoT at large. Lastly, the article outlines a revised approach to ownership of personal data in IoT that may serve as a blueprint for future work in this area and inform regulatory and policy debates.

The Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP), which remains difficult for AI and philosophy of information, was recently scrutinized by M. Taddeo and L. Floridi (2005, 2007). However, their own solution to SGP, underwritten by Action-based Semantics, although different from other solutions, does not seem to be satisfactory. Moreover, it does not satisfy the authors’ principle, which they dub ‘Zero Semantic Commitment Condition’. In this paper, Taddeo and Floridi’s solution is criticized in particular because of the excessively liberal relationship between symbols and internal states of agents, which is conceived in terms of levels of abstraction. Also, the notion of action seems to be seriously defective in their theory. Due to the lack of the possibility of symbols to misrepresent, the grounded symbols remain useless for the cognitive system itself, and it is unclear why they should be grounded in the first place, as the role of grounded symbols is not specified by the proposed solution. At the same time, it is probably one of the best developed attempts to solve SGP and shows that naturalized semantics can benefit from taking artificial intelligence seriously.

The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is both unattainable and unwarranted. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to, what Luciano Floridi terms, ‘philosophical naturalism’. As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse categorization. The following paper will outline, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. The assumptions behind the current classifications of the field will be questioned. Beginning with the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael Capurro and Floridi, this paper will explicate how any such attempt to develop an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete.

Lezione online sulla relazione tra realtà virtuale, studi sul sacro e dimensione immaginale, tenuta all'Università degli Studi di Perugia per la cattedra magistrale in Sociologia della Complessità Sociale.

A partire dagli articoli di Marina Fraldi sulla sfera iniziatica del teatro virtuale, e Carmela Notarangelo sulle forme di culti tecnopagani online, pubblicati nella rivista scientifica FUTURI 14 - FIlosofie del Futuro dell'Italian Institute for the Future, si delinea un percorso originale tra teatro, virtualità, sferologia, dimensione immaginale, gamification, seità, la relazione tra programmazione e creazionismo, tecnognosi e videogiochi. 

Antonin Artaud; Henry Corbin; Peter Sloterdijk; Luciano Floridi; Mark Pesce; Elémire Zolla; Antonio Damasio; Marie-Louise von Franz; Byung-Chul Han; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Joseph Campbell; Erik Davis; Gary Lachman; Erica Lagalisse; Wu Ming 1

Direzione scientifica prof. Piero Dominici, con il coordinamento del Dott. Luigi Somma.

Information Revolution is a term frequently mentioned yet roughly defined. It’s apparent as a ghostly scapegoat that haunts or justifies anything that has to do with ICT’s and new technical media. Starting by the hypothesis that the term is misconceived, this paper is a thorough analysis of Information Revolution’s different occurring degrees – daily usage of ICT’s, economic, political, environmental, and ontological aspects - and concludes with a proposed unified general definition of the term. The reason, coinciding with the aim is multifold: Understanding Information Revolution means being able to
define it. Defining it means it’s almost or already over. The feeling that it’s not over means misconception. Information Revolution is treated here as a descendant of a technical and ontological revolutions chain that by changing the techniques and the ontologies have also changed the very notion of “revolution.” The observation is divided into three main chapters: (1) The term is first examined through its indicating symbols in everyday life, and particularly how it has already affected the notion of “revolution.” The new political “augmented revolutions” are highly defined by ICT’s. (2) The second part is a comparative navigation between what was before Information Revolution, how it was expected, and how it was actually realized. Here is shown how the term was – and still is to an extent – misconceived, and how this generates an amount of crucial political and environmental struggles. To treat Information Revolution as a successor and not as an opposition to industrial capitalism causes the regeneration of industrial problems – political class differentiation and pollution – through the filter of information. Information flood and partial information directedness causes an identity loss which can be cured through the development/awareness of a new ontology that treats information as information – not as capital. (3) The third part shows this inforgian ontology of entities living “in” Information Revolution, and possibly beyond it. This description, supported by and supporting the previous chapters, leads to the final concluding definition. The discussion is open, like the discussion of every past or almost
gone revolution. Yet, a new “revolution” seems to be expected.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959) provides an excellent proving ground for applying different notions of, and views on, the freedom of will. In this paper I apply a philosophical method of analysis, the so-called Method of Levels of Abstraction to examine issues of freedom and control, and through these, of attention, in Vonnegut’s novel.

Escribirán los anales de la historia cuando se refieran a la Inteligencia Artificial sobre uno de los más complejos e intensos debates en esta materia: del esperanzado Dennet al escéptico Searle. Dos eminencias en el debate de la IA. El actual borrador es una revisión conceptual desde estos dos autores del problema de la intencionalidad en la IA, como base del futuro trabajo de graduación: La agencia moral en la inteligencia moral desde la perspectiva de una moral "sin mente".

En este escrito planteo la necesidad de resemantizar el concepto de intencionalidad para que este sea adecuado al nuevo "objeto/sujeto" de estudio: la inteligencia artificial.

In this paper, I discuss the peculiarity of the Italian philosophy of the “impure reason” by highlighting the connection between the ideas of a “classic” Italian philosopher and the works of a contemporary Italian philosopher: Giambattista Vico and Luciano Floridi. With this aim, I present a defence of “constructionism” from an epistemological and conceptual point of view (§ 2), and then I claim that, in an anthropological and philosophical perspective, to inherit means constructing or reconstructing, that is, hacking (§ 3).

In this paper, I argue that the distinction between information and data lies at the root of much confusion that surrounds the concept of information. Although data are ‘out there’ and concrete, informational content is abstract and always co-constituted by information agents – a set which includes at least linguistically capable human beings. Information is thus not an intrinsic property of concrete data, but rather a relational property, which relies on the existence of information agents. To reach this conclusion I first argue that the semantic content of human-generated data is co-constituted by the information agent. In the second part I broaden the scope and argue that environmental information also depends on information agents. I further consider and reject both Dretske’s view of information as an objective commodity and foundational accounts of information, that take information to be the fundamental ingredient of reality.

✪ This paper was awarded the Pierre Bayle Bokaal 2014 - an award for the best student essay of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam ✪

SILVA, Pietra Vaz Diógenes da. A sociedade de risco na infosfera: diálogo
entre Ulrich Beck e Luciano Floridi. In: STANCIOLI, Brunello Souza; PEREIRA, Cecília Lopes Guimarães; ALVES, Marco Antônio Sousa (Orgs.). Revolução Informacional: reflexões a partir de Luciano Floridi. 1. ed. Belo Horizonte: Initia Via, 2022. p. 120-141.

Recent proposals to think about philosophy as conceptual design (Floridi, 2019) fail to understand the
scope and method of philosophical thinking. The goal of philosophy is truth, but truth has a double
direction: towards theory and towards practice. The design is in the middle and it lacks the criteria in
order to evaluate itself, since its truth depends on the theory on which it is based and on the practical use
of its functions. Furthermore, design lacks critical ability, since only the horizon of existence, in social and
political terms, offers the possibility to judge about the validity of a project.

The increasing use of the virtual space invites ethical reflection on revealed forms of moral progress. Social scientist, psychologists and philosophers are not yet able to conclude on their ethical implications. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how social knowledge might examine these developments. To address this lacuna, this paper investigates the moral progress of online relationships by means of the theory of The Social Construction of Reality of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which holds that the significant other plays a key role on the character building of the individual. This paper argues in favor of a new belief: the cyberspace creates ways of relating that produce moral progress. On one hand, the multiplicity of significant others will represent roadblocks for the individuals, forcing them to develop ethical skills to overcome them. On the other hand, and most importantly, significant others will interact among each other to constitute new trues that will set the way for a new moral venue. This outcome is explained using the concept of the generalized other as exposed by the philosopher George H. Mead. As a result, I propose that cyberspace is positively shaping the moral
character of the individual.

El concepto de información posee una larga trayectoria, revitalizada con el surgimiento de la computación y la cibernética a mediados del siglo XX. En la actualidad, filósofos como Luciano Floridi proponen emplear la noción de información como piedra basal de un nuevo enfoque de toda la filosofía y de las ciencias sociales. Desde la economía, Joseph Stiglitz y otros, siguiendo trayectorias de investigación diferentes a las de Floridi, también han planteado que el concepto de información pone al descubierto las falencias del modelo neoclásico y abre nuevas perspectivas para pensar un paradigma distinto de estudio y práctica de esta disciplina.

Resumo: O artigo apresenta, de forma introdutória, a Filosofia da Informação, abordagem teórico-metodológica desenvolvida por Luciano Floridi como uma fundamentação epistemológica adequada à sociedade da informação, termo proposto como representativo do atual cenário socio-histórico. Por meio de um estudo com características exploratórias, discute conceitos cruciais do pensamento de Floridi, como informação semântica e veridicalidade da informação, para demonstrar como esse pensamento trata da questão da desinformação. Relaciona, por fim, as ideias de Floridi com a noção de 'confiabilidade informacional', conceito a ser desenvolvido no contexto contemporâneo visando ao combate à desinformação. Palavras-chave: Filosofia da informação. Luciano Floridi. Informação semântica. Desinformação. Confiabilidade informacional. 1 Introdução O surgimento da chamada sociedade da informação tem trazido novas formas de pensar sobre as atividades humanas e sua relação com a informação e o conhecimento. Como Castells (1999) indica, há uma transição do industrialismo para um informacionalismo, proveniente principalmente do desenvolvimento das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC). Luciano Floridi (2010b) afirma que, por meio da revolução da informação, as TIC promoveram uma nova organização da sociedade, que passou a funcionar em torno de serviços e produtos informacionais.

Some authors, most notably Luciano Floridi, have recently argued for a notion of " strongly " semantic information, according to which information " encapsulates " truth (the so-called " veridicality thesis "). We propose a simple framework to compare different formal explications of this concept and assess their relative merits. It turns out that the most adequate proposal is that based on the notion of " partial truth " , which measures the amount of " information about the truth " conveyed by a given statement. We conclude with some critical remarks concerning the veridical-ity thesis in connection with the role played by truth and information as relevant cognitive goals of inquiry.

To introduce Luciano Floridi’s theses, I will start from what I believe is his own starting point: defining the role and the challenges of philosophy in the contemporary world. In his writings, Floridi presents to his readers a scenario that is very familiar to any human being who is a member of the contemporary society and pursues everyday all the typical activities of that society. It is before our eyes: in the last decades, the world has changed dramatically and so fast that also relatively young people have witnessed some of these changes in person. The metamorphosis is still in progress: it is easy to predict that in the following years the world will continue changing and evolving. The question now is: towards what will these changes bring our world and us? Moreover, are we ready for such a new world and are we aware of what is happening at all?

Introducao : O artigo aborda o atual cenario da desinformacao presente na web com o surgimento de terminologias como ‘ fake news ’, ‘ pos-verdade ’, ‘ deepfake ’, entre outros. Para tanto, primeiramente remete as discussoes socio-historicas que caracterizam o periodo de transformacao da modernidade (pos-modernidade, alta modernidade, modernidade liquida). Apresenta tambem nocoes teoricas sobre a sociedade da informacao e a cibercultura. Tal contextualizacao serve de fundamento para algumas definicoes sobre informacao e desinformacao. Objetivo : Apresentar o atual contexto informacional envolvendo a desinformacao para sugerir novas dinâmicas no papel do profissional da informacao e no campo de atuacao da Ciencia da Informacao. Metodologia : Utiliza como modelo epistemologico, a teoria e o mapa conceitual de Luciano Floridi, por meio de uma pesquisa bibliografica exploratoria. Resultados e conclusao : Conclui que, perante este novo cenario, e imprescindivel um olhar critico na forma d...

For some advocates of the “Italian Thought”, the Weak Thought would have joined the ultra-linguistic and ultra-deconstructive postmodernism; but what if some core-ideas of Weak Thought are still relevant, and, far from pointing at the end of the thought, it gives us useful resources and tools for the construction of a new ontology for the digital age? What if for Weak Thought the Verwindung of the metaphysics is not only the end of an ontology of the strong sender and the strong receiver, but also the beginning of an ontology of the interactions? In order to discuss this, I develop the intuition of G. Vattimo according to which there could be a connection between the informational-world and the weakening of Being, by highlighting the possible connection of such weak “interactionist” ontology and some traits of the informational ontology suggested by another Italian thinker: L. Floridi.

O artigo apresenta, de forma introdutória, a Filosofia da Informação, abordagem teórico-metodológica desenvolvida por Luciano Floridi como uma fundamentação epistemológica adequada à sociedade da informação, termo proposto como representativo do atual cenário socio-histórico. Por meio de um estudo com características exploratórias, discute conceitos cruciais do pensamento de Floridi, como informação semântica e veridicalidade da informação, para demonstrar como esse pensamento trata da questão da desinformação. Relaciona, por fim, as ideias de Floridi com a noção de ‘confiabilidade informacional’, conceito a ser desenvolvido no contexto contemporâneo visando ao combate à desinformação.

A call for papers is open for the 1st Workshop with the title "Testing Embodied Cognition: The Embodied Mind in a Cognitive Universal Body"
5th September 2019 - “Taberna” – Alte Mensa – Georg-August-Universität Göttingen  -
Deadline for submission: 20th August 2019
Confirmed Keynote: Prof. G. Metta (iCub Project)/Alessandra Sciutti (iCub Project)

This paper discusses differing perspectives relevant to library and information studies (LIS) regarding the philosophy of information, primarily disparate accounts of ontology. The perspectives include, but are not limited to, those of Luciano Floridi, Raphael Capurro, Michael Eldred, applied ontologists like Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, Fred Fonseca, and Bernd Frohmann. Slavoj Žižek’s parallax ontology is used as a leitmotif and theoretical frame to provide a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of differing standpoints on ontological issues within LIS and the philosophy of information. Parallax ontology is presented not as a replacement for any particular perspective but rather as a means to utilize the differing points of view. The antinomies within and between these perspectives are not overcome through some kind of synthesis but instead disclose the fundamentally irreconcilable nature of the topic of ontology itself, particularly within LIS and the philosophy of information. The paper concludes with an assessment of the importance of this type of research, and the topics of ontology and the philosophy of information in particular.

In Pensare l’infosfera La filosofia come design concettuale, Luciano Floridi states the value of a correct analysis and philosophical responses within the information age we are living in. The aim of this paper is to suggest several ideas for reflecting on some of Floridi’s topics such as the analysis of presence, relationship and semantization. In the second paragraph, after a brief introduction about the author, I will analyse philosophical insights on the relationship between being and determination. In the third paragraph, I am going to suggest the importance of a correct analysis of presence. In the fourth paragraph, a possible analogy between the philosophy of information and a certain form of neo-idealism will be shown. At last, I try to show how the philosophy of information can play a key role in the way we think about reality, but also its possible conceptual risks.

This paper starts by acknowledging the growing popularity of the idea that living in the infosphere is producing a reontologization of the world (§ 0), and aims to test such a belief by examining the problem of an ontology of information machines. After explaining the sense in which I use the term “ontology” (§ 1), I discuss the main features of digital ontology and informational ontology: on the one hand, I present the ontological status that information has in digital ontology (§ 2.1) and informational ontology (§ 3.1); on the other hand, I identify the basic characteristics of ICTs that digital ontology (§ 2.2) and informational ontology (§ 3.2) put at the centre of their operation of “symbolic doubling”. Finally, through a comparison with some issues of the continental philosophical tradition, I claim that informational ontology can be considered an ontology at the same time more radical than digital ontology but also weaker, and I conclude by highlighting the difficulties that its conceptual elaboration seems to entail (§ 4).

The paper suggests that the process of insularization show concretely at the “extra–linguistic” macroscopic level of reality what for some linguists is valid at the “infra–linguistic” level of reality and for some philosophers is valid at the “extra–linguistic” microscopic level of reality: individual entities are actually given, but more as provisional results of relational processes and less as things which are already made and have not relations with their surroundings. With this aim, I start defining the Saussure’s idea that in language there are only differences without positive terms through the words of G. Boehm, who describes language as a network of boundary lines which delimit a group of islands of meaning. Thus, I highlight the connection between the problem of the structure of the language (linguistic level) and the problem of the structure of the world (ontological level): we tend to see the world alternately as made of matter and atoms (of separated islands), or as made of energy and fields (of waters), but what if we consider it made of information and interactions — that is, of archipelagos? (§ 0). Hence, I discuss such oscillation by contraposing the digital ontologies and the informational ontology: I explain that they consider the “bit” of information respectively as an atom–island and as a difference–interaction. Thus, I claim that we can develop the core–idea of the informational ontology, passing from its micro–level to the macro–level of “folk ontology”, if we consider islands not only textually, but also and first of all extra–textually — that is, not just as words and metaphors, but firstly as things and — better — as processes (§ 1). Then, I use some philosophical tools (mainly from G. Deleuze’s and P. Sloterdijk’s works) and some anthropological hints (mostly the idea of an archipelagic perspectivism) to stress that the geophysical reality of islands is a tangible sign of the  archipelagic” way in which the reality of things is structured. I insist that a world understood as an archipelago is a world understood as made not of bounded shores, but of islands of difference in seas of similitude, affected by climate change, currents, and the inhabiting work of everything — human and non–human. Finally, I underline that in an archipelagic world we have neither “isolated” islands, nor “flat” water: instead, we have waters that connect and separate islands that take shape exactly along such process of dynamic differentiation (§ 2).

Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (2010, 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” It is unlikely that we can do this without linking that study to the epistemic purposes of creating, processing, managing, and using information. Doing so, we claim with Floridi, requires attention to the epistemic value of information. In particular, our interest in information has a number of purposes, one of which is to acquire knowledge.

In this paper, I theoretically expand the idea of "religion of technical progress", firstly used by Carl Schmitt in his essay "The age of neutralizations and depoliticizations". After having introduced and analyzed this concept, I present a twofold argument: I claim that the religion of technical progress is a highly depoliticizing tool that aims to depict a fully "neutralized" society while not eliminating political conflict. To better supporting my argument, I conclude by presenting as a case study the current COVID19 pandemic.

Che rivoluzione è la Rivoluzione dell’Intelligenza Artificiale (AI)?
Si tratta di un cambiamento epocale dai contorni non del tutto chiari. Non a caso lo stanno studiando in molti. L’Unione Europea ha già preso posizione a favore di un’AI al servizio dell’umanità. Volendo la si potrebbe definire una scelta «intelligente». Ma di che intelligenza stiamo parlando in questo contesto? A prima vista sembrerebbe trattarsi di un’intelligenza in grado di supervisionare e orientare in modo moralmente retto i processi di cambiamento. Bene, ma in quale relazione sta questo tipo di intelligenza con l’intelligenza calcolistica, lineare, algoritmica, di cui sostanzialmente si occupano le tecnologie AI? E, più in generale, come retroagisce il concetto di AI sulla comprensione di noi stessi in quanto creature intelligenti nel senso moralmente ricco evocato sopra?
Nel mio intervento discuterò in particolare un aspetto dell’intelligenza umana, cioè la capacità di distinguere tra desideri (o bisogni) superficiali e profondi, riconoscendo dietro l’apparenza delle cose una realtà e una verità superiore. Per usare una metafora musicale, le persone entrano in risonanza con queste verità profonde dell’esistenza. Non si limitano cioè a metterle a fuoco astrattamente, ma sono «toccate» da esse in un modo che spesso le spinge a cambiare anche radicalmente le proprie vite.
Esiste una Rivoluzione dell’Intelligenza Artificiale in grado di fare tesoro di questo aspetto enigmatico dell’intelligenza umana?

O artigo aborda o atual cenário da desinformação presente na web com o surgimento de terminologias como 'fake news', 'pós-verdade', 'deepfake', entre outros. Para tanto, primeiramente remete às discussões sócio-históricas que caracterizam o período de transformação da modernidade (pós-modernidade, alta modernidade, modernidade líquida). Apresenta também noções teóricas sobre a sociedade da informação e a cibercultura. Tal contextualização serve de fundamento para algumas definições sobre informação e desinformação. Objetivo: Apresentar o atual contexto informacional envolvendo a desinformação para sugerir novas dinâmicas no papel do profissional da informação e no campo de atuação da Ciência da Informação. Metodologia: Utiliza como modelo epistemológico, a teoria e o mapa conceitual de Luciano Floridi, por meio de uma pesquisa bibliográfica exploratória. Resultados e conclusão: Conclui que, perante este novo cenário, é imprescindível um olhar crítico na forma de lidar com a informação, buscando formas de assegurar a confiabilidade informacional. Tal cenário também propõe novos desafios e paradigmas aos profissionais da informação e à Ciência da Informação enquanto área do conhecimento. Descritores: Desinformação. Disseminação da informação. Confiabilidade informacional. Fake news. Sociedade da informação.

As Editor-in-Chief at The Freelance Netizen™ online magazine, I edit, peer-review and supervise peer review services for all article and editorial submissions.

The Freelance Netizen™ explores the interdisciplinary connections between Information & Communication Technologies and the history of information culture, civil rights and social action. It critically addresses digital mediums as the intercultural confluence of global dialectics. A typical editorial at TFN magazine might explore the present and future directions of Intercultural Information Ethics and its crossroads with the latest WikiLeaks debate.

TFN magazine provides a crossroads between the academic applications of philosophy, technology and interculture with current events, looking to philosophies of communication and information as a platform for addressing questions of digital ontology. TFN magazine is currently exploring, alongside the International Centre for Information Ethics, applications of global citizenship in a digital era with a specific address of digital citizenship and the netizen.

The objective of TFN magazine is to further expertise in intercultural editing and writing for academic and scholarly communications and current events, both on a local and global scale, by researching and structuring innovative dialogue towards a citizen engagement of Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) through an understanding of the nature of information.

Jared Bielby,
Editor-in-Chief, TFN
Co-chair, ICIE
Editor, IRIE
www.jaredbielby.com

http://www.thefreelancenetizen.com

Starting from a theoretical recognition of the classical positions on identity, we propose an integrated concept of human identity. It assumes the relationship between man and technology as an unavoidable feature. This hypothesis-based on the paradigm of the informa-tional society-focuses on the consequences of the constant interaction between human beings and information and communication technologies (ICT), showing several effects on habits and on formation of human identity determined by digital technologies. According to an axiological point of view, we intend to identify potentialities and risks of this interaction , recovering a humanistic orientation at the basis of education. I. L'IDENTITÀ UMANA ALLA RICERCA DI UNA DEFINIZIONE La questione dell'identità umana ha radici filosofiche profonde e diretta attinenza con di-lemmi dell'antropologia e della filosofia della mente, che rimandano agli orizzonti metafisico, etico ed epistemologico, solo sfiorati in questo intervento. Tali interrogativi possono essere sin-tetizzati nelle seguenti domande: chi sono e che cosa sono? 1 Quesiti centrali all'interno della filo-sofia occidentale, 2 specie a partire dalla modernità. A mio avviso, si può rintracciare un'evolu-zione delle risposte in merito a tali questioni, che riflette sempre più un'apertura di sguardo e di 1 Ovviamente si possono rintracciare ulteriori livelli d'indagine sottesi ad ulteriori do-mande: a titolo esemplificativo, la questione de lla persistenza, ovvero della 'durata' dell'identità, e la questione inerente la personalità, ovvero la determinazione d elle caratteristiche che rendono un soggetto 'persona'. 2 Ma non solo. Si veda T. J INPA, Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy, Routledge, Lon-don 2002.

Can one distinguish between natural objects and artifacts? Or should one look at the universe without considering natural-artifact dichotomy? The answers of these questions, determine the position of philosophy of technology in confronting with the technical artifacts, and bring about challenging issues. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from different perspectives. First, we will express the contemporary philosophers’ views about the distinction between artifacts and natural object, which the boundary between these two worlds seems to be unclear to some extent in their views and one can’t, without controversy, categorize things into these two categories.

Situated within the context of the emerging concept of blended cognition between human and artificial entities, the present brief paper suggest that emphasis should be placed on the concept of automation in humans and (artificially intelligent) machines in order to understand clearly how unclear the opposition between the two categories is. After a short introduction on the relevance of artificial intelligence in various levels of the social fabric, such as policymaking and business strategies, and a discussion on the ill-defined conceptualization of several related terms such as “artificial,” “intelligence,” “consciousness,” the paper investigates “automation,” “automatism,” “automaton,” and “autism,” from psychoanalytical, cybernetic, control systems theoretical, and psychological perspectives, in the context of a Wittgensteinian language-game, drawing comparisons which in turn result to a number of remarks on the relationship between human and artificial agents. Firstly, it appears that human consciousness is deeply associated with non-automatic behavior while its unconsciousness is related to automatic expressions, whereas machine behavior is deeply associated with automatic function with unconsciousness being its only form of expression. Suggesting, however, a flatter ontology based on the concepts of infosphere, treating both humans and machines as inforgs, it is recommended that we think about the unexplained part left in the model of the following quadrant: (a) human non-automatic conscious, (b) human automatic unconscious, (c) machine automatic “conscious,” and (d) X. The paper concludes that by borrowing the algebraic method of cross-multiplication, multiplying (a) to (c) and dividing the result by (b), that is, investigating empirically the relationship between everyday interactions of conscious humans and unconscious machines, and then analyzing the results according to topics concerned with unconscious human behaviors will help creating a rather clearer view of what constitutes X, that is, what is actually feared in the expression of erratic machine behavior sometimes mistakenly understood as conscious.