1.
Changing views
Although
common sense tells us that there is only one reality, it is not at all
trivial to understand what real really means. This question is
not
of the same kind as the question what kind of things are more or less
real.
The
human experiences of birth and death as well as the confrontation with
a world of facts are basic to the most general human answer to the
second
question, namely that there is a kind of things which are not subjected
to natality and mortality and which are the origin or the cause of all
other real things. Gods are the mythical answer to the question: what
things
are the most real ones?
The
question: What does real mean? is not a mythical one. It
belongs
to a specific kind of research called by the Greeks philosophia
i.e. the search for the origin of what is real and of what real means.
Both questions are interrelated but the predominance of the second one
is probably a specificity of the Greek tradition of
thinking.
Thales
of Milet (6th Century BC), one of the so-called Pre-Socratic
philosophers, was the first to be called a wise man (sophos).
He predicted eclipses of the sun and was, according to Aristotle, the
first
thinker who speculated about the nature of all natural things (physis),
independently of what myths said. His answer was: water, on which the
Earth
swims. Thales believed that god was the world's intelligence, water
being
a kind of sacred force moving all things. Water is the reality or, as
we
would say, the medium of all things.
The
questions: What is real? and: What is the meaning of real? were
at the core of classic Greek philosophy. Socrates was the living
philosopher in the sense that his life was devoted to showing the
persistent
sense of these questions and the impossibility for a philosopher to
find
a solution to these problems without falling into a self-performative
contradiction.
Plato's theory of ideas and Aristotle's conception of the real (energeia
= actuality) as being in a process of becoming (dynamis = potentiality)
were two highly influential theories giving rise to science, the study
of reality.
Christianity
introduced the conception of a transcendent god, creator of all things.
The philosophical question: What does real mean? received the
answer:
to be real means to be the product of god's creative power. Real things
are created things or creatures (ens creatum). A distinction was
made between creation and information: once things are
created
out of nothing by god (creatio ex nihilo) they enter into a
process
where reality is the effect produced by a form on a given substance,
its information (informatio). The divine fabrication
as process
of in-formation was described by Plato in his dialogue Timaios
as
the work of a pottery god (demiourgos) (Capurro 1978,
Capurro/Fleissner/Hofkirchner
1999).
If
we take a god's form as the medium for all things or of all things
being
transformed into their original form through a process with a beginning
and an end, we get, in a very simplified formula, the idea of the unity
of the world with the world's spirit or form as developed by Hegel. The
materialist antipode says: the real is nothing but the product of an
evolutionary
self-organising process of matter and form.
2.
Perception as world construction
Modernity
changed the traditional constructivist view of reality as conceived by
the theological thinking of the Middle Ages and the idea of a divine
architect
producing things out of nothing. According to Immanuel Kant's famous Copernican
Revolution, things do not just revolve around a fixed human knower
but such a knower, being a spatio-temporal one, can only have a look at
things according to his own perceptual and intellectual
constitution.
What
is the real? The answer is: the real is, for a human knower, the effect
of his observation on given data. Things (res) are the product
of
an encounter. They are what they appear to be (phaenomenon).
Reality
is what things are when they are brought into a perceptual and
conceptual
order by a human knower. What they are in themselves, i.e. for a divine
architect who is not limited in his knowledge by the medium through
which
it understands, is unattainable for a finite being (Kant
1910).
Kant
develops a double-bind conception of reality construction: he gives a
human
knower the power of world construction under given natural conditions
and,
at the same time, he leaves an empty place with regard to a possible
view
of reality under a divine perspective. In other words, he splits the
concept
of reality and does not accept any kind of analogies or even univocity
between our way of reality construction and the creator's
way.
The
construction of the given in the mind of the knower and perceiver was
underlined
by George Berkeley in his famous dictum: "Their esse is percipi":
Unthinking things have no existence out of the mind of thinking things.
"It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of
human
knowledge," he writes, "that they are either ideas actually
imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to
the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas
formed
by help of memory and imagination" (Berkeley 1965: 61). Nothing can be
real without a mind perceiving them. Their reality is their being
perceived.
When I smell or touch something and then I say: this is real, all I say
concerns its relation of being perceived. He gives up any kind of
substratum
or given data. What remains as real are spirits and their ideas or
sense-impressions.
Kant
and Berkeley are constructivists. Kant leaves our knowledge about the
activity
of the divine architect void and splits the real into given data and
the
human constructor's rules. Berkeley dissolves this dichotomy within the
activity of human and divine pure spirit.
3.
The real is the digital
Paradoxically,
Berkeley's spiritualistic approach is similar to today's conception
according
to which reality is a product of the brain. Everything that is, is a
product
of the brain. There is a third option beyond materialism and idealism
as
expressed by a famous pun: What is mind? No matter. What is matter?
Never
mind! Instead of materialism and idealism we get something that could
be
called cerebralism or brain-oriented ontology.
But
what is the brain? It is (said to be) an information processing device.
What does real mean? It means to be programmed. Things are
programs.
The starting point of this widespread digital constructivism is not
Kant's given data but digitized data. What cannot be
digitalized is
not (real). To put it in Berkeley's formula: To be, is to be
digital.
Esse est computari (Negroponte 1995). We believe that we have
understood
something in its being when we are able to make it or to re-make
digitally.
Physical things are neither (no longer) the basis nor the paradigm for
answering the question: What things are real? and they are not
explained
by permanent a priori rules in the constructor's mind as Kant
postulated.
The constructor may even be able to change his/her own perception rules
at least through their externalization in a computer device. So-called
real things are nothing but examples of original devices. There is a
kind
of digital Platonism in this view of the appearances as derived from
some
form-producing digital device.
Digital
beings are not just the sum of their bits. They must have a form or
structure.
Being is in-formation. Or, to use Berkeley once again: esse est
informari.
The old couple matter/form is substituted by a new one: digital/form
or,
under another perspective, electromagnetic medium/digital forms. Real
things
in the sense used by the materialists are not replaced by digital
programs
but they are re-viewed and displaced from their ruling position
(Benedikt
1994). It is not the mind or the brain that is being in-formed
or im-pressed by external things, as empiricists and
idealists postulated
but the other way around.
The
human brain itself happens to be just one kind of in-forming device,
whose
mechanisms and rules could be changed. Digital ontology takes us to a
more
fundamental question than the one about what computers can't do. It is
the question, once again: what does real mean? Human beings or,
as cerebralists prefer to say, human brains are not the only form
producers.
Computer devices are means for the production of forms as well as for
knowing
them. Evolution has been producing forms for thousands of millions of
years.
And we are part of this process. The physicist and philosopher
Carl-Friedrich
von Weizsäcker, who has analysed the concept of information in
many
of his works, states that the knowledge process, i.e. the information
process
of knowing and producing forms, being itself a product of evolution,
cannot
attain definite "clear concepts" (Weizsäcker 1992: 344,
Capurro/Fleissner/Hofkirchner
1999, Capurro 1999a).There is a kind of circularity between knowing and
producing forms that seems basic to any kind of information process,
not
just to the digital. Nevertheless the digital seems to have a special
leadership
in today's answer to the question: What is real?
4.
Beyond the digital
What
is
the impact of digital ontology on human affairs? There is a key human
experience
that I would like to call spectrality. Everybody knows what it
means
to say: Yesterday when I was in New York I was thinking about my being
in Switzerland soon. Or: tomorrow I am planning to go to the mountains
for a walk, but it depends on the weather. Or: at the moment I am
physically
here, in this room, but during the talk I am in my mind downstairs,
expecting
a friend.
These
are very simple everyday experiences of our being in space and time. We
are here at some place but also somewhere else. We look through the
window
and we are there at the top of the mountain and at the same time here
in
this room. We think back and relocate ourselves within a situation
yesterday
which has, in this moment of its revival, a special kind of being. We
constantly
project ourselves back and forth. We have memories of the past but also
phantasies of possible futures. We are together with other persons
sharing
our bodily presence but we do this also with the feeling of the
possibility
of sharing a common future, for instance, to walk together downstairs
in
a few minutes or to remember our flight last night.
These
kinds of experiences give our lives a special dimension that I call
spectrality
(Capurro 1999: 46, McHoul 1999). It is a kind of ghostly feeling in
which
probably the idea of being a spirit as well as the idea of pure spirits
or ghosts has one of its roots. According to this possibility we have
developed
different kinds of techniques that have allowed us to re-present
ourselves
in different forms through space and time. Digital technology is, I
believe,
not just a computational device. Being in cyberspace allows us new
forms
and feelings of being here and there. It has the tendency of
eliminating
space and time just as other communication techniques such as TV,
telephone
and broadcasting do too, of connecting the universal and individual
perspectives
in a non-hierarchical architecture. As there is no physical
transportation,
bodily experiences are kept behind their digital
transformation.
The
medium, made of numbers and intangible structures, seems to be ghostly
too. Our expectation of instantaneous response is markedly stressed
when
we are disappointed because we have to wait some minutes or even some
seconds
for a link in the Internet. Finally the medium allows many ways of
doing
things with words. Perlocutionary acts, as John Austin called them, are
now possible within a worldwide digital and decentralised network, with
dramatic changes in the economic and cultural fields.
To
summarise some of the features of the impact of digital technology on
human
affairs:
- Our
being
in time is presence-oriented
- Our
being
in space is globally oriented
- Our
being
with others is ghost-oriented
- Our
being
on earth is construction-oriented
Is
the
world after all just a dream? This question has a long and rich
tradition
(Capurro 1996). Digital technology has a major impact on it. Ghostly
technology
is dreaming us. There is a lot of media-smog in the air. Reality is
vanishing.
There is a lot of suffering, hunger and hate. We should look through
the
looking glass. Questions are more interesting than answers.