IV. A New Axial Age

Gardels: Does all this suggest we are entering a new “axial age,” as the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers named that period 2,000 years ago when all the great religions and ethical systems — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets — emerged simultaneously in a de-synchronized and mostly unconnected world?

In history, the accomplishment of convergence yields a new divergence. As we’ve been discussing, the search for a new beginning after the triumph of modernity is now underway. The global conquest of the West and its philosophy has now reached its limits and is fragmenting. The dialectic is turning. The modern Tower of Babel is poised to crumble.

If we are in a “new condition of philosophizing,” what comes next?

Hui: We are at the beginning of what you call a “new axial age” as a result of this universalization and convergence. The question now is not “what will happen,” but “what can happen?”...

However, for me, this discourse on locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the local and a new understanding of history.

III. The End Of The Enlightenment

Gardels: Heidegger talked about cybernetics as the end of Western metaphysics because, through feedback loops within a system, the organism and the machine, the objective and the subjective, were able to integrate. Henry Kissinger more recently argued that the advent of AI marks the “end of the Enlightenment,” of human-centered philosophy since, like humans, machines can now adapt to their environment by incorporating, through learning from experience, the unexpected events of contingency.

Now, Kissinger argues, instead of the Enlightenment philosophy giving birth to the technological domination of the West, AI is propelling the search for a new philosophy.

This idea of recursivity corresponds to what we have understood as the soul. The soul has the capacity of coming back to itself in order to know itself and determine itself. Every time it departs from itself through a new encounter, it actualizes itself in the traces we call memory. New information — contingency — triggers the process of individuation. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it, information is “the difference which makes a difference.” That is why he spoke of “an ecology of the mind.” The uniqueness of every being is constituted by this play of recursivity and contingency.

Hui: Because our technological creations are challenging historical limits through climate change, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, it is critical to reexamine the diversity of cosmotechnics, or how technology is infused with a worldview. The modernizers of China during the last 150 years have enthusiastically embraced the Western meaning of technology — tools to establish human dominion over all else. However, in order to go beyond Western modernity and the current mode of global modernization, we have to reflect on how non-European thought and corollary ways of being can affect the development of technology.

Hybrid quantum dynamics explores the interaction and evolution of systems combining both quantum and classical degrees of freedom, offering a way to study complex phenomena that can't be fully captured by either quantum or classical mechanics alone.

Constructor theory expresses physical laws exclusively in terms of which physical transformations, or tasks, are possible versus which are impossible, and why.

Information science is, or should be, involved with the whole concept of knowledge
in whatever form its manifestations may take.
Jesse Shera (1973, 286)

Apparently, there is not a uniform conception of information science. The field
seems to follow different approaches and traditions: for example, objective
approaches versus cognitive approaches, and the library tradition versus the
documentation tradition versus the computation tradition. The concept has
different meanings, which imply different knowledge domains. Different knowledge
domains imply different fields. Nevertheless, all of them are represented by the
same name, information science. No wonder that scholars, practitioners, and
students are confused.
Chaim Zins (2007, 341)

The chunky concepts which make up our field’s intellectual core (e.g. knowledge,
information, communication, representation) are neither owned by information
science nor likely to be assembled into an entirely credible canon without the
judicious...