Digital Existence

Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture

Amanda Lagerkvist, Amanda Lagerkvist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351607179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture advances debates on digital culture and digital religion in two complementary ways. First, by focalizing the themes 'ontology, ' 'ethics' and 'transcendence, ' it builds on insights from research on digital religion in order to reframe the field and pursue an existential media analysis that further pushes beyond the mandatory focus in mainstream media studies on the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of digitalization. Second, the collection also implies a broadening of the scope of the debate in the field of media, religion and culture – and digital religion in particular – beyond 'religion, ' to include the wider existential dimensions of digital media. It is the first volume on our digital existence in the budding field of existential media studies.

Part I
Media ontologies

1
Irremediability

On the very concept of digital ontology

Justin Clemens and Adam Nash

The implications of the digital for ontology

This essay discusses what we and many others have termed ‘digital ontology’ (hereafter 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 ontologies (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 overturns? 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 formalisation?

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 anthropological, 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 technologies, 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 empty 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 contemporary positions regarding DO, we return to some of the most influential twentieth-century thinkers of the relation between technology and ontology, including Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler and Alain Badiou. This return enables us to establish certain requisites for any ontology that avoid the difficulties that beset Boellstoerff 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 certain 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,’ formalised in 1972, an as-yet unsolved dilemma which poses whether certain 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 difficulties that emerged first in post–World War II computing, which don’t uphold an absolute exclusion 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 technology 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 contradictions 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 inconsistent; 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 chapter, we will name this paraconsistent DO ir-re-mediable.

Too much, too little, too fast, too diverse, too repetitive

On 7 January 2017, an online search from Melbourne, Australia, for the syntagm ‘digital ontology’ turned up ‘About 1,040,000 results’ in ‘(0.59 seconds).’ Almost nothing in this sentence would have made any sense that was not science-fictional until very recently – perhaps not even until the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet, through a version of a paradox well-known to media scholars, the unprecedented speed, reach, size and accessibility of such an information search seems, through its very power, to have been almost-immediately ‘naturalised.’ This paradox – that what is most novel and most shocking about contemporary information technology is also its most banal, everyday feature – should induce us to think again about the status of this ‘banal estrangement.’ For the rapid transformation of irreality to banality hasn’t necessarily served media scholars well. Part of the problem with such ‘an approach to an approach’ is that it may have already been irremediably falsified by the new technologies themselves. The very self-evidence and extremity of the information revolution may, by another, associated paradox, seriously inhibit, if not render impossible, any viable account (e.g., well-founded, evidence-based, plausible, or persuasive) of its status. Perhaps it is the case that these technologies make it impossible to know the very knowledge that they alone make possible to know. Modern media may be, precisely, ir-re-mediable.

Even trying to face this truly gigantic set of results, available to us practically immediately, should suggest some serious, perhaps constitutively disabling practical difficulties (see Andrejevic 2013). No one person – nor two people, nor even a dedicated team of people – would be able to sift through this vast array of results in any acceptable fashion in any acceptable time. Given the global extension, sheer number, speed and instability of the information, the evidence itself beggars any possibility of a synoptic account, let alone the viable reproduction or review of the results by a third party. To refer to a Hegelian concept: the paradox of absolute knowledge is that its instantiation entails its evacuation. This is a theme foundational to our argument, to which we will return throughout this essay.

Let us simply take the first page of our search, on which there are 11 results: ‘Against Digital Ontology – Luciano Floridi’; ‘Digital Ontology – Cultural Anthropology’; ‘Is There an Ontology to the Digital – Cultural Anthropology’; ‘Digital Ontologies | Material World’; ‘What Is Digital Ontology | IGI Global’; ‘Against Digital Ontology – PhilSci Archive’; ‘Digital Physics – Wikipedia’; ‘Against Digital Ontology | SpringerLink’; ‘Against Digital Ontology – Oxford Scholarship’; ‘[PDF] Against Digital Ontology – Luciano Floridi’; ‘For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.’

There are a number of relevant features about this shortlist. First, the repetitions: Luciano Floridi’s paper Against Digital Ontology appears five times, in at least three different versions (the author’s prepublication manuscript, a paper in the journal Synthese, and a chapter in the book The Philosophy of Information), linked to four different sites, two of these academic sharing sites (Philsci-Archive and Philosophy of Information), two of them proprietary publishing sites (Oxford Scholarship Online and Springer). Two of the links are to ‘Cultural Anthropology (print ISSN 0886–7356; online ISSN 1548–1360), the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association’; another to the blog ‘Material World,’ based at University College London, which hosted workshops which led to the Cultural Anthropology publications already noted; one link is to an article by Tom Boellstorff, who is also a contributor to the aforementioned Cultural Anthropology issue; another is to a Wikipedia article on ‘Digital physics’; yet another is to the proprietary site IGI Global, which provides the definition ‘The view that reality is essentially digital in nature,’ and linking to ‘Learn more in: A Scientist-Poet’s Account of Ontology in Information Science.’ All the sites are English language, linked to powerful institutions based mainly in the United Kingdom or the United States.

The well-known issue of algorithmic closure – that Google searches operate according to proprietary algorithms that select results on the basis of prior searches, among other factors – is alarmingly patent from the outset. Searches in French for ‘ontologie numérique’ turned up ‘About 163,000 results (0.34 seconds); in German, for digitale Ontologie, ‘About 223,000 results (0.69 seconds).’ Despite the literalism of such translations of ‘digital ontology,’ it is clear that, even in closely related modern European languages, there is a notable divergence of terms and results. Presumably it is also of some significance that the comparable Wikipedia pages for ‘Physique numérique (théorique)’ and ‘Digitale Physik’ also turn up on the first page of search results, offering very similar accounts to the English version. The problems of filter bubbles, repetitions-too-numerous-to-handle, uncategorised or miscategorised links, indefinite linkages, and incommensurable multiple languages, can thus be added to the difficulties regarding any initial basic efforts to delimit the field.

One might initially think that these difficulties could be overlooked or treated as if they were simply a matter of size and speed, such that so-called big data methodologies, software and hardware would be able to handle. Indeed, these new methods might seem to be the only ways to handle such vast unstable quantities of information. Unfortunately, we need to specify right away that, for structural reasons, this cannot be the case. On the contrary, big data simply exacerbates the problems, rather than resolves them – and in a number of important ways. We have already mentioned the fluctuating semantics of philosophical keywords, as well as their variable translation both intra- and inter-lingually. We could also immediately invoke the gap (discussed below in more detail) between terminology and concepts. We could also point to the difficulty of deciding the status of a model of the logic of a system which takes place within the system that it is itself nominally modelling. Certainly, some of these problems are ancient, even foundational philosophical topoi, and therefore not dependent upon digital technology. Yet they are by no means circumvented or resolved by the new technologies: on the contrary, they are radicalised.

Even if we were to act as if these difficulties had not insuperably altered the very status of knowledge itself, and were to turn to the content of the first page articles in English, we would still encounter severe, perhaps irreconcilable differences regarding the sense and reference of the syntagm ‘digital ontology.’ Let’s take only three of these, that is, three quite different projects which turned up, albeit in different guises, on our first page of English language results, Luciano Floridi, Tom Boellstoerff, and the so-called digital physicists. As we shall see, these are quite different projects; yet, despite these differences, we will also suggest some unexpected continuities. Whether our demonstration holds at all, even constrained to the very first page, is something that, as we have said, is today absolutely indeterminable, given the affordances of digital technology itself.

An informational ontology?

Floridi’s much-circulated and much-cited attack on the very notion of ‘digital ontology’ takes the phrase in a highly technical sense: the doctrine that “the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing machine.”¹ Floridi wishes to criticise this account in favour of his own sceptical proposal for an informational ontology, that is, that “the ultimate nature of reality is structural.”

Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s famous account of the antinomies of pure reason in the first Critique, he seeks to show how the difference between considering nature as discrete (digital) as opposed to continuous (analogue) is itself a consequence of “features of the level of abstraction modelling the system, not of the modelled system in itself” (Floridi 2009, p. 160). In reconstructing the alleged claims of DO, Floridi considers its fundamental thesis to be that the physical universe is founded on discrete entities, that all “reality can be decomposed into ultimate, discrete indivisibilia” (Floridi 2009, p. 153). Floridi gives an extended thought experiment in which four agents, which he angelically names Michael (an ontological agent, “capable of showing that reality in itself is either digital or analogue”), Gabriel (a translation agent), Rafael (an epistemic agent) and Uriel (who shows the irreducibility in observations of reality), all resembling Turing machines, interact in such a way as to render it moot whether reality in itself is either digital or analogue. If there is not the space here to examine Floridi’s impressive neo-Kantian argument in the requisite detail, it is worth underlining that it depends upon an intricate faculty structure which relies on there being a gap between the noumenal (‘reality in itself’) and any possible knowledge we might have of it. For Floridi, again, “digital and analogue are features of the level of abstraction,” and not at all of reality itself. (One might suggest that this judgment is itself a consequence of the theory’s initial separation of knowledge and the real, which, in giving priority to epistemology, already happily determines the outcome of the case.)

Floridi is therefore concerned to separate the ‘informational’ from the ‘digital,’ precisely because, depending on the level of abstraction, the former can present either as analogue or digital, continuous or discrete. Moreover, as Janice Richardson specifies, Floridi elsewhere

distinguishes between the infosphere, as the environment in which our information is transferred, and the Infosphere (with a capital I). The reference to the ‘Infosphere’ involves a bolder ontological claim. The Infosphere refers to everything that exists; the whole of Being.

(Richardson 2016, p. 139)

Such Being is constituted by “structural objects that are neither substantial nor material … but cohering clusters of data” (Richardson 2016, p. 139). It seems that Floridi is proposing an ontology that gives us transmaterialist organisations of dat...