The foundation of the digital mind

Kon­stan­tin A. Ocheretyany
Saint Peters­burg State Uni­ver­si­ty

The foun­da­tion of the dig­i­tal mind

Abstract. The arti­cle aims to inter­pret the phe­nom­e­non of media ratio­nal­i­ty as a ratio­nal­i­ty of the mod­ern era. On doing this, the author pur­sues the objec­tives to elu­ci­date the ori­gins, vec­tors of devel­op­ment, and the prin­ci­ples of those forms of sen­su­al­i­ty, cat­e­gories of think­ing, and eth­i­cal imper­a­tives that are set by the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment. Method­olog­i­cal­ly, these objec­tives are ensured by the implic­it hermeneu­tics of the phe­nom­e­non, i.e. its con­sid­er­a­tion from the inside, from the media rationality’s intrin­sic con­cep­tu­al, expres­sive, per­for­ma­tive resource. The word “ratio­nal­i­ty” belongs to the Latin lan­guage and is ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly ram­i­fied; how­ev­er, due to the philo­soph­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion of the Mod­ern peri­od, its field of val­ues was added with “account” as “cal­cu­la­tion” and “fore­cast”, while the pre-Latin tra­di­tion deemed the “account” in anoth­er way. Par­tic­u­lar­ly, Pla­to dis­tin­guished between “mar­ket cal­cu­la­tion” and “ini­tial count” under­stand­ing the lat­ter as fun­da­men­tal modes of open­ness to the world. Myths, rit­u­als, sac­ri­fices, and plays as ancient anthro­potech­nics were linked to the count that arranged the order of sen­su­al­i­ty, the order of desire, and the order of knowl­edge. With the evo­lu­tion of the indus­tri­al cul­ture, the for­mer rit­u­al prac­tices were trans­formed into ratio­nal fore­cast pro­grams (legal, cred­it, method­olog­i­cal, etc.), and anthro­potech­nics got replaced by mech­a­nisms, machin­ery, and appa­ra­tus. Through machines, the require­ments for effi­cien­cy rapid­ly increase; how­ev­er, the increas­ing effi­cien­cy everts itself through itself and acquires the oppo­site mean­ing. Prag­mat­ic-ori­ent­ed tech­nolo­gies are applied for non-prag­mat­ic pur­pos­es, reviv­ing the repressed – myths, rit­u­als, and games – on a new, dig­i­tal, basis. Com­put­er games give us back the ratio­nal­i­ty as an under­stand­ing from with­in, an open­ness to the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment. Media ratio­nal­i­ty emerges as a dia­logue with the oppor­tu­ni­ties that media give us for clar­i­fy­ing the expe­ri­ence of the world and our­selves in it. 

Key­words: epis­te­mol­o­gy, tech­nol­o­gy, space and time, media phi­los­o­phy, media real­i­ty, inter­face, dig­i­tal human­i­ty, cul­ture, ratio­nal­i­ty

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192113

Acknowl­edge­ments
The study was car­ried out with the finan­cial sup­port of Grant of the Pres­i­dent of the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion. Project МК-2256.2018.6.

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