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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.
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