The "Digital Habitat" is a relatively new universe where many of us spend a huge amount of time - (well, a part of us does that, the part that is "transcendental", our bodies are largely barred from entering that habitat)
When I was in my teens and twenties, that was not yet possible - for better or worse. Lots of questions arise with this new habitat. As a father of two, I feel a certain unease when I see the lives of my beloved ones being "absorbed" by smartphones and rendered unresponsive to "real life". Perhaps we need to clarify what "real life" actually means. What follows is a lengthy quote by Norbert Wiener on that matter. (Excerpt from “The Human use of Human beings, N. Wiener, 1950) " Here I want to interject the semantic point that such words as life, purpose, and soul are grossly inadequate to precise scientific thinking. These terms have gained their significance through our recognition of the unity of a certain group of phenomena, and do not in fact furnish us with any adequate basis to characterize this unity. Whenever we find a new phenomenon which partakes to some degree of the nature of those which we have already termed "living phenomena," but does not conform to all the associated aspects which define the term "life," we are faced with the problem whether to enlarge the word "life" so as to include them, or to define it in a more restrictive way so as to exclude them. We have encountered this problem in the past in considering viruses, which show some of the tendencies of life-to persist, to multiply, and to organize, but do not express these tendencies in a fully-developed form. Now that certain analogies of behavior are being observed between the machine and the living organism, the problem as to whether the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes, semantic and we are at liberty to answer it one way or the other as best suits our convenience. As Humpty Dumpty says about some of his more remarkable words, "I pay them extra, and make them do what I want." If we wish to use the word "life" to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy, we are at liberty to do so. However, we shall then include many astronomical phenomena which have only the shadiest resemblance to life as we ordinarily know it. It is in my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as "life," "soul," "vitalism," and the like, and say merely in connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase. When I compare the living organism with such a machine, I do not for a moment mean that the specific physical, chemical, and spiritual processes of life as we ordinarily know it are the same as those of life-imitating machines. I mean simply that they both can exemplify locally anti-entropic processes, which perhaps may also be exemplified in many other ways which we should naturally term neither biological nor mechanical. "
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AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
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