Nature of reality in the digital age

In my opinion, digital technology is not a subject that should be debated, that deserves to be positioned “for” or “against”. It is in fact an environment of existence, in the same way as nature, air, borders, economy, education... Digital technology is to be taken into account as modifying the very conditions of life. In order to touch the roots, here are several angles of view, which in my opinion draw the facets of the subject.

I believe that it is necessary to experiment rather than to seek to master, to reflect in action on our relation to the digital, and thus to found our own thought, our free will. My practices of research-action are also nourished by the frequentation of ideas of various authors, of which I propose you very partial glimpses in this article.

“Nature is a computer”

The contemporary philosopher Mark Alizart formulates the very original hypothesis that the advent of computer science would not be the result of a machinic order foreign to life, but that on the contrary “nature is a computer science”. The human being manufactures machines which are not foreign to him, but which are in his image, in the bio-mechanical principles. The digital makes us explore even more closely our deep nature, with its DNA code, the program of the living.

It (computing) makes relationships more fluid, multiplies contacts, facilitates inter-human communications. Finally, it mutates language itself, the symbolic world it constitutes and in which the Spirit has found its home, these fictions where it wanders, finally delivered from everything. This world becomes effectively a world: the virtual. The virtual reality is properly the world of the Spirit.
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The source code of machines becomes the legal law. The two are no longer distinct. There is a total performativity of information. The symbolic world is.

Mark Alizart (“Celestial Computing,” 2017)

This assimilation of thinking and doing is embodied in the way modern computing was imagined, through the concept of mixing program and information, in the aftermath of World War II. Historian of science George Dyson sums up the fundamentals very accurately.

The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and realized by John Von Neumann, abolishes the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same again.

George Dyson, quoted by Walter Isaacson in “The Innovators” (2014).

Psychoanalysis and software

Long before, Sigmund Freud postulated a “technological grammatization of the mind”. In his text “Note on the magic block” (1925), he metaphorizes the psychic apparatus in the functioning of the “magic slate”, with its layers in contact, erasures and traces. According to me, it is also a metaphor of contemporary computer science, which functions thanks to a system of languages superimposed in layers, permanently translating one into the other, making the primitive “machine language” coexist with languages progressively more comprehensible by the human (the “layers of abstraction”).

I worked on this metaphor within a video installation in the framework of the Loop exhibition in 2022, by placing a magic slate in the middle of digital image projections, to propose to the visitors to make photographs to share them between them on a dedicated platform. To make the palimpsest of the spirits by the inscription in the layers of the real, the human and the digital.

We can hypothesize that Freud was unconsciously anticipating the mutations of the circulation of human thought via machines, of which contemporary digital platforms are now the embodied supports. Later, Jacques Lacan, in his lecture “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics or the Nature of Language” (1955) makes quite explicit, again in the form of a prediction, the relationship between the mind and the machine.

Something has passed in the real, and we are left to wonder - perhaps not for very long, but not insignificant minds do - whether we have a machine that thinks.

Jacques Lacan (1955).

Jacques Lacan warns of the fusion of the digital with the real. Indeed, we see today that algorithms, at the heart of digital networks, think and do for us.

Doing with

If today’s reality is the result of a digital fusion between the mind, acts and things, what posture should we adopt, to remain in intelligence? Dominique Cardon, a digital sociologist, postulates in his work the necessity of doing with, that is, trying to understand the digital.

If we make the digital, it also makes us. This is why it is essential that we forge a digital culture.

Dominique Cardon (“Digital Culture,” 2019).

I agree with him. I am convinced that this “digital culture” is in no way alien to culture in the broadest sense, and that it is really necessary to work to remove the boundaries, fears, judgments in the face of the digital, which basically cut us off from reality, while they claim to make us find its “original purity”, before the advent of digital technologies. The National Digital Council also invites us to work in this direction.

Without considering information technologies as a miracle cure or as an absolute evil, but rather as an opportunity for change, let us reflect on the society, the citizens, the individuals we wish to become at the heart of this digital civilization

National Digital Council, 2015.

Savoir-bifurquer

Some may find these findings quite disturbing, even inhumane... And what to do with all this? Yes, how to be human in this world that is now ours, in this digital universe that can seem to dominate us, on which we have the impression of not having any control?

Bernard Stiegler, who passed away in 2020, who was an important philosopher of technology, proposes rich tracks of bushy thinking, for emancipation, which can really accompany to situate oneself, in my opinion.

Integral and generalized automation was anticipated long ago - notably by Karl Marx in 1857, by John Maynard Keynes in 1930, by Norbert Wiener and Georges Friedmann in 1950, and by Georges Elgozy in 1967. All these thinkers saw the need for radical economic, political and cultural change.
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Knowledge is always a knowledge-bifurcation.

Bernard Stiegler (“The Automatic Society. 1. The Future of Work,” 2015).

Bernard Stiegler invites us to invent, to authorize ourselves, to play with technology, to “bifurcate”, to do otherwise than what is dictated to us, with these tools in presence that change us, in short, to become actors, to be “in the grip”. He himself put it into action by creating in 2006 the IRI (Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation du Centre Pompidou).

We had a few dialogues and collaborations, notably around the Pocket Films Festival, which I created in 2005 at the request of the Forum des images to question, through creativity and side-stepping, the cameras that appeared in our pockets at the time. I continued to play to think with drones, virtual reality and other technologies and digital uses. I firmly believe that “doing” and “playing” are ways of inventing new “rules of the game”, of being the authors of them. It’s not about trying to master, but daring to work with. I encourage transgression in the use of digital tools. I propose a method in the article « Work and mastery ».

Vincent Puig, Bernard Stiegler’s fellow traveler, current director of the IRI and regular collaborator, proposed in response a more precise paradigm between reality and digital, the “knowledge environment”, as a crucible for the construction of the mind, where free will would play a full role.

For me digital is a medium of knowledge. So the question is more about the mind than the real. Or to know what the real is opposed to today: the possible or the probable.

Vincent Puig, 2023 (director of IRI, activist of a new ecology, economy and organology of the mind).

Contemporary philosophy thus meets action in a very concrete way. Philosophical questionings, even disordered and abundant, can really help us to think our choices and our gestures and thus better decide and carry them. Because the power, the performativity and the agility of the computer code can be used without our knowledge for purposes that do not serve our humanity, we know it well. I am for a critical posture, not of simplistic rejection, but of awareness of the complexity and the new conditions of life, by “doing”.

Acting as a human being

To conclude with ethics and not to lose sight of the fact that the essential thing is the relations between human beings, Serge Tisseron, psychiatrist specialist in images and new technologies, member of the Academy of Technologies, and great partner of the game, proposed me this humanistic thought.

The question is not, as we often hear, whether we will communicate with avatars as with human beings, but whether we will reduce the humans behind their avatars to them, and also why we so often communicate with the human beings around us as with avatars, reducing them to their appearance or function.

Serge Tisseron, 2023.

Drawing realized in 2019 by children of Choisy-le-Roi within the framework of a digital device of expression that I had set up there.