Journal of Philosophical Investigations

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at The European Graduate School / EGS, Saas Fee -Switzerland

Abstract

When the threat posed by the digitalization of our lives is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new phase of capitalism called “surveillance capitalism”: a total digital control over our lives exerted by state agencies and private corporations. However, important as this “surveillance capitalism” is, it is not yet the true game changer; there is a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface (“wired brain”). First, when our brain is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them; then, my brain is directly connercted to another brain, so that another individual can directly share my experience). Extrapolated to its extreme, wired brain opens up the prospect of what Ray Kurzweil called Singularity, the divine-like global space of shared awareness … Whatever the (dubious, for the time being) scientific status of this idea, it is clear that its realization will affect the basic features of humans as thinking/speaking beings: the eventual rise of Singularity will be apocalyptic in the complex meaning of the term: it will imply the encounter with a truth hidden in our ordinary human existence, i.e., the entrance into a new post-human dimension, which cannot but be experienced as catastrophic, as the end of our world. But will we still be here to experience our immersion into Singularity in any human sense of the term?

Keywords

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-      Hegel, G.W.F. (1999) Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
-      Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press
-      Fichte, J.G. (2000) Foundations of Natural Right According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000
-      Harari, Yuval Noah & Deus, Homo (2016) A Brief History of Tomorrow, London: Harvill Secker 2016
-      Kobe, Zdravko “The Interface of the Universal: On Hegel’s Concept of the Police,” available online at http://journal.instifdt.bg.ac.rs/index.php?journal =fid&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=728&path%5B%5D=624.
 
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