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 Diverse Writings 33

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld

Questioning the Digital Cast of Being

Michael Eldred

artefact - A Site of Philosophy

artefact text and translation 
Cologne, Germany

Book cover: The Digital Cast of BeingMovement and Time in
the Cyberworld
 
This study, published by De Gruyter, Berlin in 2019, is a thoroughly revised and greatly expanded (by a factor of 2.2) version, superseding The Digital Cast of Being, first published with ontos verlag, Frankfurt in 2009.

The cyberworld fast rolling in, inundating and engulfing every aspect of human living on the globe today, presents an enormous challenge to humankind. It is taken up by the media following current events through to all kinds of natural- and social-scientific discourses. Digitized technoscience develops at a breakneck pace in all areas accompanied by sociological analysis. What is missing is a philosophical response genuinely posing the basic ontological question: What is a digital being's peculiar mode of being? The present study offers a digital ontology that analyzes the dissolution of beings into bit-strings, driven by mathematized science. The mathematization of knowledge reaches back to Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and continues with Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz. Western knowledge from its inception has always been driven by an unbridled will to efficient-causal power over all kinds of movement and change. This historical trajectory culminates in the universal Turing machine that enables efficient, automated, algorithmic control over the movement of digital beings through the cyberworld. The book fills in the ontological foundations underpinning this brave new cyberworld and interrogates them, especially by questioning the millennia-old conception of 1D-linear time. An alternative ontology of movement arises, based on a radically alternative conception of 3D-time. 

In particular, an Appendix challenges the foundational indeterminacy principle in quantum mechanics, showing it to arise from a misconception of both movement and time in mathematized physics and consequently in all the modern sciences, both natural and social.
 
 


Last modified 12-Feb-2024
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      Copyright (c) 1998-2024 by Michael Eldred, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. and international copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author. Citations must be expressly acknowledged, specifying the author and title. Copyright to this study is protected by registration by means of a counting pixel with VG Wort, Munich, Germany.
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