Logic of Digital Worlds

Theory Culture Society, 2018

Human made technical objects are constantly changing, taking on new forms that are appropriate to their epoch. Technical objects in the digital age are no exception. In fact, the digital object’s rate of change at the moment is one of rapid acceleration. Only a few years ago email went out of fashion only to be replaced by Facebook and Twitter. The digital form of the technical object is in full flux and yet neither philosophy nor engineering is able to grasp its ever-changing essence. Here lies the premise of Yuk Hui’s On The Existence of Digital Objects published by University of Minnesota Press in 2016. Hui is no stranger to the nuances of either technical or the natural object having studied both Computer Engineering at The University of Hong Kong and philosophy at Goldsmiths at the now defunct Culture Studies department where he met his mentor Bernard Stiegler who offers his views on the book in the preface. Evidence of Stiegler’s influence is seen in many parts of the book but most prominently in Hui’s choice of thinkers, Husserl, Simondon and Heidegger, three figures that feature repeatedly in Stiegler’s own work most notably the three volumes of Technics and Time (Stiegler, 2009).

Review Essay of Yuk Hui's On the Existence of Digital Objects available in Issue 6 of Computational Culture: A Journal of Software studies http://computationalculture.net/envisioning-a-technological-humanism-a-review-of-yuk-huis-on-the-existence-of-digital-objects/

"Foreword to Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. vii–xiii.

Compared with other transdisicplinary frames of information Wu Kun’s philosophy of information differs in metaphysical framework in that it has a background in a conception of Dialectics of Nature coming from the old Stalin Textbook System but also a part of the renewal of thinking in China appearing through the thought liberty movement in 1980s, which among other things also added a modern view of information to Chinese thinking. Still it is a distinguish philosophy in Chinese style. Wu’s philosophical system begins be re-dividing the field of existence and founding a new ontological area or aspect of being, which he called the world of information and named it objective unreality. This, from the West, different ontological framework made the concept of information in his system different from the information concept in Shannon’s and even Wiener’s sense. Wu’s philosophy of information represents a search for a proper transdisciplinary framework of information covering objective laws, subjective meaning and intersubjective normativity on an extended view of dialectical materialism. But still it is in this framework – as so many others - difficult to integrate a first person phenomenological and experiential view of the narrative meaning aspects of cognitive and communicative systems. The article therefore discusses the attempt of the cybersemiotic framework to solve this problem by combining Luhmann’s autopoietic system theory with Peirce’s semiotics in making a sign systems information philosophy, where information concept is always integrated into the semiotic, cognitive and communicative systems of living beings. Peircean pragmaticist semiotic theory is unique in that it integrates a phenomenological basis with a fallibilist empirical realism including logic, ethics and aesthetics as normative sciences in a process philosophy.

This article examines the digital through the lens of interality and Flusser's thought. It claims that the digital affords an interological sensibility. It sees the Hive as a mythical symbol of the digital, which constitutes a new khora or milieu that reconfigures everything in it. Some of the key notions elaborated in the article include: intermind, the virtual, the digital doppelgänger, control and becoming, the acceleration of reality, etc. The article calls for openness toward no knowledge when humanity is faced with the unknown so it can improvise a new existential gyroscope adequate to the new real. [Peter Zhang. Toward an Interality-Oriented Philosophy (IOP) of the Digital. China Media Research, 15(4):13-22] 4 A man coins not a new word without some peril; for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.-Ben Jonson [T]hinking is not a continuous, discursive process-thinking "quantizes."-Vilém Flusser The digital is something we use and are used by on a daily basis but do not quite comprehend. This familiar stranger has become our constitutive other, our new dwelling. We have since been taken on a giddy journey of becoming with neither destination nor return. Myriad signs around us indicate that the digital has been and will continue to be a formidable agent of transformation. The world itself as we knew it once upon a time has been pulverized and become one with the digital sandstorm. At this post-historical, neo-nomadic moment, "know thyself" immediately entails knowing the digital. We are challenged to grasp something discursive prose made up of strings of letters is not adequate to precisely because it has rendered this means of knowing obsolescent. We have reached a point where we cannot but let go of our rational bearing because everything rational is mere content in this new medium. Literal (i.e., letter-based), linear, logical thinking has to give way to statistical, probabilistic, cybernetic, programmatic, game-theoretic, quantum-theoretic, neo-atomistic, pointillistic thinking. Ontological thinking will be overthrown, overcome, dissolved, and absorbed by interological thinking. The digital transforms our mode of existence, reconfigures our patterns of consciousness, and reshapes our collective unconscious. As members of a community of inquiry, our cause resides and proceeds in between questions and dialogues, experiments and lucky finds. We are faced with a project without precedent. To try to construct a neat system is to betray our cause. We have to own up to the fact that we simply don't know, and present our findings in a form that reveals our sense of no

Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture. Amanda Lagerkvist, ed., Routledge, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-138-09243-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10747-9 (ebk), 2019

The Implications of the Digital for Ontology This essay discusses what we and many others have termed 'digital ontology' (here-after DO). We begin by posing the following linked questions: What is DO? Does DO 'exist' at all? If so, how does DO differ from 'traditional ontology,' or, at least, from 'non-digital' or 'pre-digital' ontology? What does the adjective 'digital' signify here? How does it differ from adjectives that may seem quasi-synonymous with it, such as 'data' or 'information'? Why should we speak about ontology or perhaps even ontolo-gies (plural) at all, let alone digital ontologies? Should we not rather speak-as many have and do-of something like 'digital physics'? And how would we go about answering these questions if we did not avail ourselves of what seems to be a fundamental feature of ontological questioning, that is, a search for a method? Yet what if it is precisely the search for a method that the 'digital' undermines or over-turns? Indeed, does the digital also overturn the concept of 'ontology' itself? Could it be that DO is a paradoxical, nonsensical, or contradictory phenomenon that resists its own consistent formalization? We reuptake these difficult questions here in order to offer some background, arguments and provisional answers, and do so in a sequence of regulated steps. First, we stage some of the new issues raised by digital technologies, precisely by bringing out the problems that digital technology itself poses for research into digital technology. This staging is done by way of what has only very recently become-in the last two decades-one of the most commonplace of everyday acts: a browser search on the internet for a phrase. Although the very many complexities of such searching are by now well-studied and well-known, we briefly rehearse some of these here in order to draw out a few of their consequences for research. Second, in doing so, we identify, situate and explicate several major strands of thinking regarding DO today, with respect to three modalities in particular: the an-thropological, the analytic, and the physical, represented here respectively by the recent work of Tom Boellstoerff, Luciano Floridi, and Edward Fredkin/Stephen Wolfram and others. We will show that each of these modalities comes to be caught in something like a contradiction, which derives from their uncertain self-positioning between epistemological and ontological concerns. Precisely because they begin with the new propositions concerning knowledge that seem to be generated by digital tech- nologies, they end attempting to know by constructing doctrines of being out of their own contingent epistemological closures. Here, the conceptual restrictions derive from a commitment to a covert dialectic of the limited/unlimited/delimited, whereby what we know becomes either a limit to our knowledge of the being of the other (e.g., being as the other of knowledge), thereby alternatively refusing or projecting an emp- ty vision of being onto the other side of this knowledge or they project this knowledge in an unlimited fashion directly onto ‘being itself’ (e.g., the universe is itself a digital computer). This apparent divergence derives from their systematic solidarity with each other regarding the priority of epistemic questions. Third, following this summary, analysis and critique of these key contempo- rary positions regarding DO, we return to some of the most influential 20th century thinkers of the relation between technology and ontology, including Martin Heideg- ger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler and Alain Badiou. This return enables us to establish certain requisites for any ontology that avoid the difficulties that beset Boell- stoerff et al., even if, in turn, we will disagree with these thinkers regarding the proper method and sense of a contemporary ontology. Our disagreement will hinge on cer- tain new pragmatic and conceptual phenomena exposed by digital technologies that have no real precedent in any metaphysical or logical tradition, whether mathematical or naturalist, materialist or idealist. Here, the evidence is provided by three essentially contemporary problems, simultaneously conceptual and technical. The first of these is the so-called ‘P v. NP problem,’ formalized in 1972, an as-yet unsolved dilemma which poses whether cer- tain computational problems whose solution can be rapidly checked in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. The second concerns the claims made by non-classical (‘paraconsistent’) logics developed in the wake of operational difficul- ties that emerged first in post-WWII computing, which don’t uphold an absolute ex- clusion of contradiction, in contrast to classical logic which depends upon the Law of Non-Contradiction. Third is the operational necessity that all data be simultaneously modular and modulated, that is, at once created as elemental ‘bits,’ yet bits that are essentially mutable. We will treat these aporias as opening onto ontological questions. So, fourth, taking up the challenge of these aporias — that is, impasses of knowledge that do not thereby necessarily designate immutable limits to our thinking of being— we suggest that it is in this epistemological rift opened by digital technol- ogy that the new lineaments of a properly DO can be discerned. In conclusion, then, and on this basis, we briefly present a new theory of DO, which doesn’t treat contra- dictions as explosive or entailing only trivialities. Rather, we maintain that: ontology is always onto-technology, that is, digital; onto-technology is always a-temporal, im- personal, and in-consistent; its contemporary character is discerned through the new impasses that have been revealed to us by binary computation; these impasses deliver a new sense of being that also immediately and irremediably affects the grounds of knowing and action too. For reasons that will hopefully become apparent in the course of this presentation, we will name this paraconsistent DO ir-re-mediable.

2006

First Monday, 2010

Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information-based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of social practice. The entities and processes that constitute the stuff of social practice are thereby rendered increasingly unstable and transfigurable, producing a context of experience in which the certainties of recurring and recognizable objects are on the wane. These claims are supported with reference to 1) the elusive identity of digital documents and the problems of authentication/preservation of records such an identity posits and 2) the operations of search engines and the effects digital search has on the content of the documents it retrieves.

Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, 2020

In this article, I claim that everyday encounters with the strata of digital culture may evoke a sense of wonder and anticipation but also give rise to instances of hesitation and uncertainty, which places the individual on rough terrain where he or she stumbles around painfully seeking a firm ground. In examining these types of experiences, I analyze four videos made by artist Kang Jungsuck (1984–). What is interesting in Kang’s work is that he neither defends nor naively embraces the pervasive character of digital culture. The videos reveal the ways in which he mediates everyday life as a digitalized realm, capturing its euphoric and fascinating atmosphere as well as its pessimistic and lethargic moods. Kang’s works open up an inflected world where forces and rhythms of the post-internet generate various forms of life. The constant back- and-forth movements between the digital and the ordinary and their stuttering audiovisual qualities reflect his hesitant mind, which seeks neither to completely negate nor passively acknowledge the inescapable character of the digitalized world.

Metaphilosophy Vol. 43, No. 4, 2012

We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understand- ing? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article pro- poses to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The article contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of “relations,” on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark-up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data.