The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?
Abstract
By the cybernetic turn, two things happened: (1) Being was transformed into a process of becoming a “new” event of techno-genesis; (2) thinking was technologized, and language was depicted as a guide to action. If transformation, technologization, and visualization are new concepts of digital ontology, it should be obvious that everything strives for absolute transparency of things. Seeing vision becomes a new expression for the dream of speculative metaphysics about reflection. In this process of transcending the boundaries of “nature” and “biological evolution”, man must define himself completely differently unlike the anthropologies of the 20th century. Its place is no longer at the centre of the process of interaction between nature and culture. If the brain is immersed in neurocognitive networks, then the synapses and cortex as its essential organs also biologically default orientation point of thinking of “new” and the technical requirements for “incorporation” in the world as a design of immateriality. The brain in the technological world no longer thinks onto-theologically. Its “essence” is to allow a smooth “passage” between the digital sphere and analogous contact with something that still exists as a desolate land of rootedness in a cybernetic set of pure contingencies.
Keywords: brain, embodiment, embedment, metaphysics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, information, technosphere, chaos, networking
Introduction
In its existential “irrelevance” as homo kybernetes, man has become superfluous to the existence of a developed technological civilization. Because concerning the robot, cyborg and android, all “human” functions, including his thinking, which requires corporeal physicality, feelings and passions, traumas and pleasure, are already encoded and transmitted into cyber physicality whose keyword does not relate to rallying destruction and deconstruction (Heidegger-Derrida), but rather the establishment of binary code through the processes of embodiment/disembodiment, and embedding/disembedding. Instead of synapses and brain cortices, it’s all about chips and implants, sensors and visual dispositifs. What has been still invisible in the previous paradigm of “life” becomes the visualization process or the hologram technique “visible” as a symbolic trace of information and the genetic code to make an object ready for “artificial life”. It is not a man who teaches the machine to think, but the thought machine teaches man to see what happens as a digital simulation in the hyper-reality of “life.”
The exception creates the rule, not the other way around. It just means that, through “artificial intelligence”, human consciousness as self-consciousness is being technologically constructed, assuming the feature of the overlapping thinking of “man” and”machine”, that which at the same time encompasses counting-pointing, rational-intuitive, programmed and constructed as a posthuman constellation of the technosphere. The „uploading” of non-human existence represents truly the result of a universal hybridization of substances. We are “crosses,” mutants, and uncanny “strain” of one species, which strives to preserve its sublime freedom for the singularity of the individual in the frozen state of immortality as an image and a trace of a perpetuated presence.
1. Performance, action and emergence
By the cybernetic turn, two things happened: (1) Being was transformed into a process of becoming a “new” event of techno-genesis; (2) thinking was technologized, and language was depicted as a guide to action. What does that tell us? If transformation, technologization, and visualization are new concepts of digital ontology, it should be obvious that everything strives for absolute transparency of things. Seeing vision becomes a new expression for the dream of speculative metaphysics about reflection. What lies in both fundamental notions of Western metaphysics we commonly named as information. Due to this turn, which has the feature of a radical change of the world, it is no longer possible to speak of world-historical course towards the future as the goal and purpose of events. The introduction of “feedback”, entropy and the irreversibility of the cosmic-natural evolution of world history transformed into”globality” and “planetary” the same as different. This turn in the relationship between Being and thought works at all levels of life. What has been temporally determined from the mystery of the coming event (God?) might be now technologically scientifically calculated, planned, and constructed. And what, in turn, is spatially reorganized starting from the expansion of the Earth in space perspective has the features of interterritorial in interstellar space. To be in-between denotes a sign of human existential destiny. Neither the animal nor the machine, but also both as one-and-the-other, with the exaltation of spiritual potentiality to the image and likeness of God, the human “essence” always appears in that interspace. The same is true for his body configuration. The brain controls the hand that builds and writes, carries and nurtures, takes and gives. There is no longer a reason to outplay “idealism” and “materialism” in cognitive-theoretical disputes. What, on the contrary, now particularly captures the attention of thought curiosity in the age of the developed technological world designates the epistemological dispute between “constructivism” and “realism.” Moreover, the old doubts concerning whether science should be merely a search for “objective” truth in the infinity of the unravelling of what adorned the metaphysical Being-God-World-Man circuit or with the introduction of the animal-man-machine cybernetic circuit seem to change significantly and the task of cognition and science transcends the boundaries of both paradigms. The philosophical notion of the essence of truth must not be opened from what truth “is.” If a Being has become information and thought a transformation of a state that calls into question the causal relationship and purposefulness of a historical event, then the new epistemology of cybernetics must be reconfigured.
This means that the “task of thinking” is now derived from the relationship between the biocybernetic rationality of A-life and the control of the communication process concerning “living systems” and their environments. The relationship cannot be linear and causal in a one-way direction. Like the “scanning” of the human brain, here we encounter a complex network of events that provoke reactions in the environment from a decentralized decision-making space. The very use of new concepts shows that the way of organizing autonomous life systems is understood techno-scientifically. “Life” ─ “management” ─the mind determines what “is” that what we call life. And the way it leads and directs can be nothing “accidental” or”chaotic.” On the contrary, contingency and chaos give to the whole system some kind of rational control over the order of meaning. What had the features of depth, height and transcendence for classical metaphysics, now appears in the simulacrum of surfaces, in the play of pure immanence. Life as substitutability and replication, rather than mere mechanical reproduction, leads to a changing attitude towards the finality of human existence. The infinity of the space in which life takes place and the immortality of what constitutes its “essence” ─ the soul(psyché, ψυχή ) ─ in all recent theories of posthumanism/transhumanism is sought to understand starting from the possibility of transforming matter and energy into pure information. If the first two concepts are decisive for physics and its laws (Einstein and quantum mechanics), then it will be obvious that the third concept is associated with the mystery of bio-cybernetics.
The creation of life and the construction of A-life take place in macro-and-micro worlds. But the information in its ontological vagueness has the advantage of materializing-energizing. In this way, it can become a transformation of the state of what is no longer Being. It is nothing but the pure contingency-emergence of events in its constant transformation. From classical logic, the term “constant transformation” denotes, of course, contradictio in adjecto. Yet, from the logic of the information or digital age, that constitutes the”essence” of things. The rule of synthesis of separated and opposing concepts, their permutation and recombination ─ all these are”necessities” for the “randomness” as an exception to become the rule. But none of this could be initiated without self-organization, transformation, and self-management. With the rise of new sciences such as molecular biology, for example, the organism is trying to be understood as a biological component within a cybernetic network. To clarify this, it is necessary to bring “order” into this deterministic chaos of a new way of thinking. When we say “order”, we no longer mean hierarchy and subordination, we do not mean functions and service to some other purpose than the very biologically and cybernetically understood life. In this sense, we encounter the binary code as the fundamental way of organizing order. That is why everything becomes self-initiated and self-organized because the system works without an external driver. When action becomes possible by “feedback-loop”, we enter the era of a “polymorphous information system”. (Haraway 1985: 149)
How should one now understand what the notion of the genetic code means in contemporary biology? The codification of life, in this case, occurs by being embedded into a neural-organic network without centres and edges. As far as cognition and knowledge about it is concerned, we no longer have to think about finding hidden cause for unknown phenomena. Instead, the management of the genetic code as an information system presupposes a hybrid connection of information and language in the image record. New visualization technologies show what is happening in the microworlds of new technology. When the structure of the “essence” of new life has been changed through an experiment with a transformation in genetic inheritance, unanticipated possibilities of changing what traditional ontology called attributes or accidental phenomena arise. The singularity of life from the age of the reproduction of nature becomes the multiplication of contingencies without the original. It is a process of doubling man as a machine of life made up of information, self-organization and communication. Perhaps it will be better to cite the determined assumption by cyberneticist Andrew Pickering for the above argument. Namely, he says that the difference between the biocybernetic notion and classical science emerges from that the emphasis now highlighted the performativity and the emergence of the new, which lies in the space of the unknown and unpredictable:
“Cybernetics (…) is all that points to this transition from epistemology to ontology, from representation to performance, action and origin.” (Pickering 2002: 414)
If we bring together these three concepts to which Pickering draws particular attention, we will see that it designates a techno-poetic way of thinking whose fundamental feature denotes pragmatism. In the cybernetic turn, the emergence of the new from the cognitive rationality of the program as such is at work. God no longer creates naturally made beings, but algorithmic functions in conjunction with the idea ofconstructing a material-energy creature that is governed by its environment employing an information system. Therefore, the action and purpose of life can no longer be explained by the mystery of the emergence of consciousness without an explanation of how this and such consciousness works at all. The purpose of the action reciprocally affects the features of consciousness. But this does not mean that within biocybernetics the problem of the emergence of consciousness based on the logic of information is solved regardless of the context and situation of one’s actions. The pragmatism of action does not emerge from a priori conditions of the possibility of consciousness (the idea ofspace and time in the transcendental view). Nothing more is guaranteed in advance. Instead, everything must be open in a contingent event of unpredictability and uncertainty.
What about the technosphere or the “third order of cybernetics” ─ what kind of concept would be that assemblage? There is no doubt that the solution lies in the notion of system-environment interaction, that is, learning and self-reproduction. Many theorists of “artificial intelligence” in this try to assume the key features of the concept of “new”. The “artificial brain” does not adapt to the new situation that exists independently of its cognitive capacities in the so-called objective reality. On the contrary, the synthetically organized mind itself creates what is “new.” Thus, adaptation to the environment takes place as an autopoietic way of self-organization. At the same time, the word “adapt” loses its original meaning. This is not about merging with what is already pre-existing. Extending signifies a different state of affairs. Whoever fits does not adapt passively to the circumstances. On the contrary, integration presupposes active participation in the creation of the environment. The debate over the relationship between mind and body can no longer be likened to Cartesian dualism. Embedment, which here holds new meaning, rather than not theological nor physiological, becomes central to A–intelligence. (Haugeland in Fingerhut, Hufendiek and Wild 2013: 105-143)
Incarnation and incorporation do not refer to organisms in the function of some external purpose that governs life processes as a substitute for God in the cosmic-natural course of evolution. Besides, in all attempts to grind the metaphysical image of the world, the problem of God as the principle of creation of the world and related ideas oscillates between its methodical suspension and neutralization, abolishing the reasons for the complexity of the physical world, or the solution is reduced to ontological-epistemological consecration of his attributes (from Spinoza through Nietzsche to Deleuze). It seems necessary to draw attention to the following difference between metaphysics and digital ontology. In the first case, incarnation could be thought of as starting only theologically from God as the creator of man. The body of Christ (corpus Christi) gives to man what exactly the keyword of Western art means ─ mimesis (imitatio). (Nancy 2000) For a man to be an eikon-icon of the image of God, it is necessary for his spiritual image to be filled with divine grace, and not with the external power of the body as a machine. Also, what constitutes the third member of this singular essence of man refers to the immortality of the soul. The incarnation, therefore, in classical metaphysics, especially in Christianity, can be nothing but spiritualization and enthusiasm (ecstasis, ἔκστασις). It comes “from above.” The incarnation of Christ, therefore, refers to the three-fold entry-into-the-world as a divine, spiritual, and bodily event of the redemption of man from original sin. Unlike the aesthetic act of incarnation by which the body has its sublimity only at a distance from heaven and earth, the cybernetic act of self-creation of “artificial nature” becomes an aesthetic construction of the multiplication of an already non-existent original. The incorporation of the body will be possible only under the assumption of abolishing the boundaries between the “trinity”: spirit-soul-body. It is by no means surprising that the fundamental problem of transhumanism boils down to the expansion of man’s cognitive abilities beyond his corporal organization. The humans who appear in the process of resuscitation from the state of clinical death by thawing the organs are replaceable. They can be printed using a 3D printer as a simulacrum of a new reality. Although this is not yet applied in practice, except in SF films and experimentally in laboratories under the watchful eye of robotics, genetic engineers and nanotechnologists, there is no doubt that the process of constructing a “new body” of man has surpassed what we call a supplement. What for Christian theology denotes the idea of resurrection, and without this act of faith in God according to the adopted dogma becomes superfluous, for cybernetics should be in the very essence of transhumanism ─ cryonics. (More andVita-More 2013)
The mysteries of incarnation and the technoscientific practice of (re)constructing a “new life” still share the same problem. It is about the singularity of the authentic existence of man and all other beings. Just as man is irreplaceable, so by analogy, one can speak of the irreplaceability of cyborgs and androids. The immortality of the soul cannot be, however, a condition for the possibility of the immortality of the body concerning the biological-technical autonomy of its “new creation.” When we compare the fundamental categories of biological evolution with the technological, we see that the principle of analogy can no longer be valid as a guide for new thinking. It even has to be suspended and neutralized so that we can think of a “new beginning”. Let’s look at this series: incarnation, adaptation, autonomy, the interaction of system and environment, learning and self-reproduction. All categories are arranged without logical-historical a priori. Time no longer precedes simplification because it should be reduced to a networked “moment” that is constantly renewed (nunc stans). This is the known effect of information implosion. The faster the process of creating a “new” based on information processing, the less the possibility of biological adaptation, learning and openness of the system itself. If some new media theorists claim that man is slower than technology and that his natural ability to adapt to the speed of creating new performances of the technosphere has stunted him concerning all the wonders of the “smart-creative industries”, then this warning should be taken seriously. Within the metaphysical understanding of its location and position in the universe, the body finds itself limited between the idea of God and his “imitation” in man. The problem with cosmic-natural evolution is that thought, which now encompasses the idea of A-intelligence for its technical progress, transcends its shackles of natural corporeality.
What Erich Hörl calls the “cybernetic picture of thought” has been developed from the coexistence of the “first” and the “second” machine (Hörl, 2008: 163-195). The first is, of course, the one who imitates (mimesis) nature as a Being in its beings and cannot be other than the mechanics of the movement of nature itself. The human body serves here as a model for the mechanical upgrade of organs. The key term denotes the materiality of matter or its extension (extensio). What expands and narrows represents a fundamental property of matter in its quantitative determination. The origin of the universe might be therefore described by the image of the “big bang” (explosio). The end of the universe can only be the swallowing of matter in the hatch of black holes ─ by narrowing and contracting to the zero points (implosio). When Norbert Wiener, together with Claude Shannon, introduced the notion of entropy from the second law of thermodynamics, the reason was evidently in the impossibility of clarifying the notion of information by reducing it to the materiality of matter and to another notion with which classical mechanics would lose its rule in the late 19th century. Entering the realm of the “other machine” is determined by the release of energy. This was a crucial concept for Aristotle’s understanding of the (meta)physics of motion. Being as energeia already in itself presupposes the completeness of the world within the limits of physical expansion and contraction of matter (hylé, ὕλη). “Second-generation “machines are pure technology based on the energy potentials of matter. It transforms the world into “smelters”, to use the metaphor of Ernst Jünger. Both, machines as a transcript of the mechanical motion of the human body and machines as energy self-propelled engines (steam and steel machines) are therefore the same. The only difference is in the intensity of strength and power. With the peak in the neutron bomb, the technology becomes self-destructive. In the first case, it is about restraining matter by directing it for purposes other than pure chaos and natural order, and in the second we have to release energy for creative-destructive purposes.
Philosophically, the most significant notion for the essence of technology within the same circle of metaphysics has been given by Heidegger to the notion of enframing (Gestell).(Heidegger, 2009: 9-10) It was an introduction to what transcends all human power to control nature and the human world. The last in the series, the idea of a “third machine” comes from cybernetics. Information, therefore, cannot be reduced to either the first or the second. That is why I call the term technosphere the absolute time of a machine as an autopoietic system. It must be powered by an”artificial brain” creating new worlds of “artificial life”. The technosphere denotes nothing but the pure immateriality of information. It appears in the form of technologically produced life whose energy power is controlled as a balance of biological-cosmic chaos. “Necessity” now becomes a”case” of absolute freedom of self-creation. There is no longer a first cause and the last purpose. All that remains is to devise a different way of purposeful existence. After the gods leave this world, people can no longer pretend to sovereignly rule the fragments of history. The time of the absolute machine no longer takes place in the infinite duration. Instead, nonlinear “open systems” calculate time starting from the last zone of entropy.
2. Interactors ─Enactivism ─ Computation
A brief history of the emergence of A-intelligence will show us how thinking about the technosphere has developed. The traditional understanding of AI was based on mathematics and formal logic. In doing so, computation we should assume as a method that, with the help of algorithmic models, seeks to create frameworks for predicting (probabilism) the actions of the presumed subject/actor of this event. With the development of new technologies with a shift of focus to superconducting materials, computers gradually shifted to methods of connectionism from the 1970s to the late 1980s. This meant that biology and neurophysiology became the fundamental sciences of managing the living environment of the “artificial mind.” New robotics spurred by the development of cybernetics in the 1990s shifted its research to neuro-cognitivism. This has resulted in the naming of the thinking machine appearing through “Embodied Artificial Intelligence“. (Johnston 2008: 337-384) Entering the “third order of cybernetics” thus established an autonomous connection between machines as autopoietic systems. In the logic of “networking”, more such systems are machines that communicate with each other, not humans. The reason is that biocybernetic or information code is required for communication. If it is absent, communication becomes a “white noise”. Nothing might be more understandable because chaos has crept into the inter-space between signal and message. Triumph over chaos represents the culmination of the modern way of communication. In this process of transcending the boundaries of “nature” and “biological evolution”, man must define himself differently than he did in the anthropologies of the 20th century. Its place cannot be long at the centre of the process of interaction between nature and culture. We witness just a quite reversal situation and can call it technological or cybernetic. This means that control and communication between the system and the environment in the technological world take place within a neural-digital network. The machine assumes the existence of an inter-network within which the interactors operate.
Their task is to simultaneously bring what should be embodied in the technology integrated. In this way, the living or biologically determined field of matter and energy with the markings of the human body and its sensory-experiential abilities passes into the cybernetic field of information-loop circulation. The attempt of the “third way” between mind and feelings concerning the problems of thought and corporeality is therefore manifested in the theory of enactivism in modern neurocognitive sciences. In the new technical environment, the mind can be “embodied” as an emergent and autonomous network. Enactivism is demonstrated in the cognitive sciences by a theoretical attempt to solve the mysteries of the emergence of consciousness in a dynamic balance between the cognitive process and the environment. It derives only from this encounter that “thoughts” produce and become information as instructions for use. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1993)
The philosophical issue of consciousness starts, as Descartes put it at the beginning of the new Era, from an axiom: I think, therefore, I am (cogitoergo sum). The significance of this saying does not consist in the fact that “idealism” as opposed to “materialism” or the rule of the subject over the object derives from it. Quite the opposite, the thought that becomes the first presupposition of Being as a conscious existence separates itself from all that is unconscious and inanimate. It will be no coincidence, therefore, that with Descartes the duality of mind and body is introduced into the metaphysical adventure. How this duality is expressed is often forgotten. Namely, Descartes did not equate thought and mind starting from the transcendence of Being. What determines the possibility of a “fatal” duality of mind and body arises from the separation of a substance into (a) thinking (res cogitans) and (b) body(res extensa). While the feature of the former denotes in the self-creative process of reflection of Being, the latter should be ascribed the”second-class” status of the extensiveness of matter. The body must be therefore necessarily thought of as mere matter, which, however, functions only because it works like a machine (automaton). (Descartes 1956)
The problem of Cartesian heritage in the assemblage of contemporary philosophy and its appropriate science arises, therefore, from the idea of “Incarnation” (embodiment) consciousness as self-consciousness. In different phenomenological approaches, the philosophy of the 20th century separates the so-called pre-reflexive cogito of the reflexive, the unconscious of the conscious. It was already obvious that the unconscious, this key notion of psychoanalysis, cannot be understood without what constitutes the levels of the conscious subject. But thanks to neuroscience, it has become commonplace today to argue that the duality between mind and body has been resolved from the standpoint of the brain problem as a neural network of consciousness. If we want to be completely precise, we will say that only two cognitive-theoretical positions can be defended against Descartes’ dualism. The first presupposes the interaction of both, but without the causal relationship that traditionally belongs to the realm of matter or corporeality. What remains in this dispute comes down to the irreducibility of differences. And this means that the brain unites cognitive-bodily operations within the contextual environment of its action. Connectivism relies on the achievements of the cognitive sciences. But it also applies the results of contemporary research in neurophysiology and neuropsychology. That’s the other solution. (Sturma 2013)
It is easy to say, as the cyberneticist Gotthard Günther has argued, that the dualism of soul/mind and body is pointless from the human position in the world after the experiences of quantum mechanics, philosophical anthropology and cybernetics. (Günther 1963: 201) However, it might be much more difficult to prove how and why human action in the technological world cannot be explained without some kind of “necessary” recurrence of the Cartesian problem: that, namely, conscious action cannot be completely separated from the materiality of the body and from the mysteries of what Jacques Lacan ascribed to desire as a subversion of rational order. What designates this “relapse”? Simply put, the axiom of cognitive action means that thinking does not just justify the “meaning of Being.” If so, it would be a path to pure theoretical or transcendental behaviourism. In short, the mind would set itself up as a kind of single judge even in such disputes as that of love or interest, beauty or wisdom, etc. Since Cartesian dualism rests on “rationalizing” a Being as the objectivity of objects, it should be quite obvious why its alternative finds in what is read in contemporary French philosophy as an area of irreducible desire.
Seeing from a Cartesian perspective, thinking becomes now”embodied.” It will be no coincidence that we put the term in quotation marks. The reason is to be found in the fact that the process of dematerialization also means the process of losing the “essence” of the thing itself. But the loss of physicality should be understood only conditionally. The solution to the problem, however, cannot be in the dialectical logic of the synthesis of contradictions. On the contrary, every “incarnation” represents a step towards the process of the emergence of new corporeality, the “essence” of which must be determined to start from the construction of a technical object. What systems theory calls “embedment ” takes over techno-genetic processes. So, they cannot be described in analogy with “first and second nature”, nor can they be considered “metaphors”. (Mac Cormac in Huning 1986: 47-62) The opposition between “incarnation” and “incorporation” comes from classical logic. From Aristotle, it argues that A cannot be B at the same time. Furthermore, the principle of the exclusion of the third is how Being should be understood in its necessary factuality as presence (ousia). What is valid for the age of the”first and second machine” (matter + energy) can no longer have the meaning of the rule of the fundamental principle and for the age of the “third machine”. Information determines the”essence” of thought as the operational activities of the brain beyond the distinction between “nature” and “culture.” Therefore, the only real problem of this and such thought belongs to the construction of a new “artificial life”.
When a cognitive turn becomes a new mental condition, we can argue that the technological mind creates an “artificial life” which is increasingly becoming a singular event without the original, albeit without a copy in the sense of the traditional notion of reproducing the original. Far from it, everything must now be thought of radically differently, beyond the binary oppositions we have inherited for centuries and built palaces of ideas on it. When thought thinks of Being in its primordial openness it expresses and sings it in a mythopoetic way. Language does not serve thinking like a mere tool for communication in the community. Its “essence” lies in the narrative speech about the event of Being and time. Consciousness in this respect is directed towards dematerialization and energy must be transformed into pure information. However, this process does not take place without some kind of “mentalism” that opposes the empirical processes of corporeality (physicalism and psychologism). The self-consciousness of the”third machine” belongs to the mental facts related to calculation and utterance with the primacy of pragmatic “being” information. Its “essence” should be determined by changing the behaviour of the recipient in the process of creating information. This change goes back to the possibility of learning because memory as a confirmation in a continuum of time is shown by the way information is preserved and reshaped. (von Weizsäcker 1974:89-113)
Preserving the coded message with a living testimony allows for a change in behaviour toward the present. Formally speaking, the information remains “the same”. But its meanings became different due to a new interpretation within a differently arranged context. In contemporary philosophy, Derrida has cultivated a relationship between text and language. If everything, namely, denotes the text as a universal structure of information in a network of singular events, then man can no longer be understood from the position of a modern subject. Instead, the mystery of information allows for the emergence of decentralized structures that relate to each other like diverse texts. (Sandbothe 2001) The unpredictability and probability of events also refer to changes in the common life of people in complex social orders. Namely, it is not uncommon for modern sociology, which since its inception in the 19th century has sought to approach the ideal of the exact natural sciences, to use terms from theories of contingency, chaos, complexity, and emergencies. (Novotny 2005: 15-35) Of course, it follows that machine thinking related to context and situation, and not to Cartesian understanding of the corporeality of events, significantly changes the notion of the effect of thought and the activity of the body in virtual space. The environment is understood in a more complex understanding of interactivity and interaction. Of course, this presupposes a different definition of the notion of the object outside the modern framework of the subject’s rule. However, neither the context nor the situation cannot be in itself something beyond the mental reach of cybernetically understood self-awareness. It might be only a matter of a different rearrangement of concepts after the end of metaphysics. One of the reasons for the dominance of the notion of pragmatics in the information age should, therefore, be sought in the “plasticity” of the brain. If finally, we try to illustrate the distinction between the “analogue” and “digital” worlds, then the scheme would look like this:
If we start, however, from the assumption that between thermodynamic equilibrium as the basic structure of the universe and the evolution of the development of the non-linear cybernetical “laws,” there is a relationship that cannot be understood within the logic of contradictions, it seems that the time confirmed that new thinking of the digital age is based on a logic of trans-junction. (Günther 1976: 249-328) This means that aporia and paradoxes are forming the internal structure of multidimensional thinking. Its fundamental notion has been represented by information. But it will be quite obvious that the approach to this notion differs fundamentally in philosophy, physics, cybernetics, cognitive sciences, sociobiology, etc. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker defines the notion of information tautologically, but with the addition of the Aristotelian notion of energy potentiality: information denotes what produces other information and thus changes its content. (von Weizsäcker 1974: 222-228) If matter is characterized by extensibility and energy by force, the information derives from the structure of entropy as the second law of thermodynamics. The paradox and aporia are that this law speaks of a closed system. So, it is ruled by “laws” based on the causality of the physical world. The closed system, therefore, develops in the direction of its disintegration. The result is that “feedback” allows control from the system that is in principle open only because autopoietic “living systems” themselves reproduce at a higher level “information entropy”. This means that chaos denotes a legitimate order of new complexity, such as the staging of financial crises in the action of global capitalism today. (Paić 2020)
When we look at the network of concepts and their distinction regarding the relationship between the analogue and digital worlds, the first thing that catches our eye represents the impossibility of “analogy”. Namely, the digital age appears under the condition of the possibility of preserving the analogous way of thinking. Although nature no longer has its “essence”, its transformation into a technical circuit must not be taken lightly. This means that the”second analogy” is hidden in the difference as the driving principle of the “new”. What is now “similar” to something “original” cannot be longer “similar” or”original” in any way. Technological simulation constructs a new world without the substantial unity of the concept of “reality”.(Bense 1998: 443) Digital, however, denotes simulating in virtual space as a new “nature”. It is the “real” one that gives the possibility of transformation into information ready for use. The spirit of reproduction creates analogies. In contrast, the manipulation of the genetic code in the processes of living cloning leaves no room for similarities. Instead, we encounter the logic of the simulacrum starting now from difference versus identity, not from identity versus difference. (Deleuze 1969)
The technosphere, unlike technique and technology, can no longer be understood at all in the categories of causality and purpose. The reason is to be seen in the fact that its order of categories and concepts is such that it signifies the rule of A-intelligence over “nature” in the ontological sense. In this way, information opposes entropy just as linea revolutionary development opposes a closed circle of chaos-and-order. There is a nonlinear relationship between information and entropy. All the novelty of cybernetics concerning the previous paradigm of modern science and technology is found in this relationship. To be able to think outside the confines of metaphysics, thought must be “embodied” by”disembodied” in the idea of a self-organized “thinking machine” (computer). What had the features of “incarnation” becomes the “incorporation” of artificial intelligence into all remaining biological-socio-cultural networks of meaning. It should be, therefore, necessary to talk about the digital aesthetics that no longer means “beauty” in already existing industrial environmental matters ready with a use (ready-mades). This “Duchamp’s law” no longer occurs in the inventive-creative environment of information-communication design. While, for the analogue age,”incarnation” arose from the necessity of the creative production of Being as nature (mimesis-representatio), we are now in the age of radical digital constructivism. In the horizon of time, it is quite obvious that what adorned Newton’s laws of motion, of which the law of gravitation denotes the fundamental law of modern physics, is being moved into spaces of irreversible duration (durée). Bergson placed this fundamental principle at the centre of a new understanding of time. However, the problem is that time as information in the philosophical sense of the word should be reduced to implosion (“white holes”). Unlike black holes of antimatter from which nothing can come out “outside”, in the case of”white holes” it is about the fact that nothing can go”inside” anymore. This only means that time, concerning the experience of “infinite speed” (vitesse infinie), moves away and closer from the point of consciousness of movement. The higher the speed of movement of the observed, the more the observation itself seems to accelerate the action of consciousness as a “third machine”. Thinking at that level of absolute reflection thinks of itself and produces itself as an object of thought. Information becomes entropy and entropy information in the cosmic order of things. (Ebert in von Weizsäcker 1974: 222-228)
3. Neurocognitive sciences and the drama of the incarnation
The brain in its openness of options represents a decentralized organ-without-body, to make use of the reversal of Artaud’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s assumption from Anti-Oedipus. If we have an embodiment in the technological construction of worlds, then the new body of the technosphere could be like a pure form in a state of infinite potentiality. Information as guidance for action allows the new “body” not to understand the transcendental or empirical experience “living body” in their “natural environment”. Instead, the cybernetically created and transformed body exists only thanks to the activity of the A-intelligence. His”second life” constructs a “third machine.” When space loses the features of two-dimensionality, a framework for the self-establishment of the network in its three-dimensionality emerges. We see how the notions are completely emptied of attachment to earthly existence. What had the scent of rootedness in the soil and homeland, suddenly takes root and becomes homelessness. The network as an infinite spread in visualization marks the journey of information, which produces new information, as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker argues.
However, the question remains: why is it necessary to “embody” human thought for “artificial intelligence” to sovereignly conquer new spaces of cognitive “miracles”? Linear progress in history has always meant the loss of what constitutes the completeness of the bodily structure adapted to the environment. The raising of apes to their hind legs and the focus of thought on their hands’ deprived man of the experience of the earth. Intelligence developed in the direction of “incarnation.” Where id was, there ego shall be (Wo es warsoll Ich werden). This program of Freud’s psychoanalysis starts from the basic premise that culture denotes a human prosthesis. The thinking must, therefore, develop in the direction of the technological construction of the environment of human life simply because the natural environment can no longer exist as a self-imposed framework of living. Organs are, however, associated with the functional structure of the body and do not change because biological evolution is complete. The hand remains with the hand as a horse’s hoof remains with the hoof. In the age of the technosphere, however, nature remains only to sublimate with the help of technological simulation. Instead of divine attributes, technological simulation in the form of an aestheticized apparatus focuses on the connection of codified rules of the game and pragmatic handling in the interaction of system and environment. The code provides instructions for action on what must ultimately be performed as used in a context and situation. In doing so, we must keep in mind that in this context there exists a different way in which the rule of the new causality-purpose scheme is established between signs and their use of the space interactors. In other words, for a sign of something to become a useful value of something, it must go through a process of interaction. Otherwise, any single “event” remains unanswered among the participants in the communication. The significance of the mutual exchange of dialogue and discourse cannot be certainly measured by the excessive propensity of Westerners for live conversations. Although the Chinese and Japanese, for example, are thought to be less talkative, it all falls apart as soon as we look at quantitative indicators of the use of iPods, androids, and smart apps. Interactivity in communication denotes the arousal of a latent psycho-cybernetic code. A machine from people, regardless of their cultural habits, makes an obedient “robot”. Everything that must “be” a machine and inits formal-material appearance would be therefore reduced to twofold:
(a)the information system sign protocol and
(b)pragmatic performance of visual communication.
It follows that the semiotics of the image and the pragmatics of knowledge are the decisive meta-disciplines in which the turn from language to the image takes place. The image transforms the language into an abstract sequence of numbers. So, the theories of visual or iconic turn, which began in the 1990s in the works of Gottfried Boehm and William T. Mitchell with an attempt to ground the entire history of art as viewed from the position of language as a metaphysical matrix, opened up an insufficiently clarified problem of the relationship between number, word and image. (Paić 2008). What connects information to communication is nothing but the meaning of the use of language itself. But use does not occur in reflection as such. It has the practical significance of transforming into a designed environment of the technical world. Signs refer to each other in other signs in the media construction of reality, while the use of a sign cannot be reduced to materiality, as one might think at first glance. Instead, using the sign takes on the character of knowledge as know-how. There is a pragmatic turn at work: knowledge serves the power of what we call the posthuman condition. In it, the concepts of control and communication replace social spontaneity and creativity.
Conclusion
If the brain is immersed in neurocognitive networks, then the synapses and cortex as its essential organs also biologically default orientation point of thinking of “new” and the technical requirements for “incorporation “in the world as a design of immateriality. The brain in the technological world no longer thinks about onto-theologically. Its”essence” is to allow a smooth “passage” between the digital sphere and analogous contact with something that still exists as a desolate land of rootedness in a cybernetic set of pure contingencies. Unlike Heidegger, it must be said that only one more God cannot save us. Salvation does not come from the illusion of a metaphysical golden age when desire is still a help. Simple, the idea of salvation is now “secularized” to the extent that what remains to be saved no longer needs to be saved at all. For metaphysics, it was the idea of man as his essence. He was given the mission of building the Earth in the splendour of truth, justice, freedom, beauty and good. Any single soteriology (Greek Soteria, Σωτηρία -salvation, redemptive) is essentially related to the idea of the beginning and end of history. Whoever, therefore, speaks of the salvation of man, always necessarily presupposes the end of time and the beginning of true history. In the realm of the immortal soul, salvation comes on the path of divine redemption. The paradox would be that today this idea has been taken over by transhumanists in a hybrid philosophical-scientific and even more technically mediated way. They see the “essence” of cosmic evolution in the development of man’s cognitive abilities and the transition to a new form of posthuman existence. (Mercer and Rothen 2015: 51-114; Paić,2019).
Instead of the glorious mission of saving “man” from the apocalypse, it might be much more significant to see something else. How else can a kind of metaphysical thinking be maintained and at what cost if “incarnation/embodiment” is replaced by “incorporation/embedment”? Does this mean that the new thought of the technosphere must necessarily “appear” in other forms of corporeality beyond the limits of the humanoid, or should it perhaps be possible to preserve the present human figure in “natural” corporeality for thought that counts with “infinite speed” (vitesse infinie)? After all, let’s remember a few performances and installations by cybernetic artist Stelarc with an ear transplant on his arm and an internet connection. Among the newer forms and discourses of contemporary art, transgenic art takes place. This confirms that the trinity of leading categories of contemporary art does not come from “art” at all. Their origin lies in the contemporary understanding of science: computation, planning, and construction. The aesthetic notions of shock, provocation and experiment correspond to this. So, the connection between biogenetics and informatics in the art cannot be merely an illustration of science and technology. The body streams obviously in constant transformation. In the previous model, there was a cause-and-effect “dogma”. Thinking determined the bodily organization and self-organization of human existence within the boundaries of a culture that had been forcibly freed from shamanic experiences of transcending “normalcy.” Without this “purification”, modern culture would be equated with the magical rites of ancient peoples such as the Aborigines and Papuans. The simplest explanation for the use of the body in sacrificing premodern and modern culture represents that in the first case, magic denies the body a fall into mutilation, monstrosity, and abomination; in the latter case, otherwise, the body in its emancipation from the “wild thought” of nature could be aestheticized even when in ritual scenes of self-sacrifice it exceeds all given limits of “normality”. Thinking means expressing the world through thoughts, and the brain functions in algorithms of computation, planning, and construction. When this distinction has been established as ontological and cybernetic, then we find ourselves in two overlapping worlds. Living between their demands ─ language and image ─ means opening up new thought perspectives. But we must never forget this: man cannot be defined as homo kybernetes by the fact that his sensibility is something derived, that traumas and pleasures stay as so far away to him. The essence of man lies strictly in incalculable existence, which stores in itself freedom and uncertainty for the time to come.
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