Yuk Hui: What is a digital object?

What is a digital object? Yuk Hui Goldsmiths University of London

Plan
Part I: Objects
Part II: Relations
Remark I
Part III: Mind
Remark II

Part I: Objects

Digital Objects

Digital Milieu

Metadata
Example of Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Peter Parker</foaf:name> <foaf:gender>Male</foaf:gender>
<foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
<foaf:givenname>Peter</foaf:givenname> <foaf:family_name>Parker</foaf:family_name> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>cf2f4bd069302febd8d7c26d803f63fa7f20bd82</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.peterparker.com"/>
<foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.peterparker.com/blog/"/>
</foaf:Person>

Metadata
Metadata of a Flickr Photo
comments: 1
dates:
dateuploaded: 8/19/07; 2:44:43 AM
lastupdate: 8/19/07; 2:44:43 AM
posted: 8/19/07; 2:44:43 AM
taken: 8/18/07; 10:44:43 PM
takengranularity: 0
description: Sent from my iPhone
editability:
canaddmeta: 0
cancomment: 0
farm: 2
geoperms:
iscontact: 0
isfamily: 0
isfriend: 0
ispublic: 1
id: 1166257196
isfavorite: 0
license: 5
location:
accuracy: 15
country: United States
county: Santa Clara
latitude: 37.444293
locality: Palo Alto
longitude: -122.160591
region: California
notes:
72157601607070993:

Metadata
h: 20
id: 72157601607070993
title: Blue Chalk Cafe
w: 68
x: 280
y: 14
originalformat: jpg
originalsecret:
location: USA
nsid: [email_address]
realname: Dave Winer
username: scriptingnews
rotation: 0
secret:
server: 1007
tags:
barcampblock:
author: [email_address]
id: 380915-1166257196-13743477
machine_tag: 0
raw: barcampblock
heatherharde:
id: 380915-1166257196-2504570
machine_tag: 0
raw: Heather Harde
techcrunch:
id: 380915-1166257196-3057
machine_tag: 0
raw: TechCrunch
title: Heather Harde, TechCrunch CEO
photopage: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/1166257196/
visibility:
isfamily: 0
isfriend: 0
ispublic: 1

Object-Data
Object  Data  Object (internet of things)

Digital Objects
Information Object (embodiment)
Perception Data (control)
Immaterial relations Material Network (Materialization)

Ontologies
“ The curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’”
W.V.O. Quine, On What There Is

Object and Appearance
Proposition 1: The core question of object for metaphysicians since Aristotle is becoming the question of appearance

Aristotle’s Ontology
Being
Substance
Accidents
Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Passion, Time, Place, Disposition, Rainment
Grammar: Subject – Predicate

Hylomorphism
“ in speaking here of matter I have in mind, say, the bronze of a statue, while by shape-form I mean the geometry of the object’s appearance and by the composite the statue itself as a whole entity”
Aristotle, Metaphysics

Hume
since no one will “assert, that substance is either a colour, or sound, or a taste”
so the “idea of substance must therefore be derived from an impression of reflection, into our passions and emotions”
“ none of which [passions and emotions] can possibly represent a substance”
“ we have therefore no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we talk or reason concerning it”
David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature

Kant
Noumena: unknowable (the-thing-in-itself)
Phenomena: knowable
perception
understanding
reason

Husserl
“ how are we to understand the fact that the ‘in itself’ of the objectivity can be thought of by us and moreover ‘apprehended’ in cognition and thus in the end yet become ‘subjective’”
Husserl, quoted by Edo Pivčević
Husserl and Phenomenology

Natural Objects
The metaphysical investigation of object has been always centered on its “Eidos”

Technical Objects
“ is not made of matter and form only. It is made up of technical elements arranged from a certain system of usage and assembled into a stable structure by the manufacturing process”
“ There would be no exaggeration in saying that the quality of a simple needle expresses the degree of perfection of a nation’s industry”
Gilbert Simondon
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

Part II: Relations

Networks

Hylomorphism?
An architectural rule which the SGML community embraced is the separation of form and content. It is an essential part of Web architecture, making possible the independence of device mentioned above, and greatly aiding the processing and analysis
Tim Berners-Lee
Web Architecture from 50,000 feet

Relations
their [Peirce and Schröder] method suffers technically (whether philosophically or not I do not at present discuss) from the fact that they regard a relation essentially as a class of couples, thus requiring elaborate formulae of summation for dealing with single relations. This view is derived, I think, probably unconsciously, from a philosophical error: it has always been customary to suppose relational propositions less ultimate than class-propositions (or subject-predicate propositions, with which class-propositions are habitually confounded), and this has led to a desire to treat relations as a kind of classes
Bertrand Russell
The principle of Mathematics

Relational Calculus
xRy
x : referents
y : relatum
R : relata
“ we can now develop the whole of mathematics without further assumptions or indefinables”
Bertrand Russell, The principle of Mathematics

Relational Database
Edgar F. Codd, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks , 1970
Tuple Relational Calculus
a simple example: consider a company has the following information inside its relational database: EMPLOYEE (SSN, Name, Bdate, Address, Salary, DeptId), and the query of a TRC will be something like this: Find all employees whose salary is greater than 30.000 { t ∣ t∈EMPLOYEE ∧ t. Salary>30. 000}

Digital Objects
A digital object is defined by relations (not subject-predicate)
A digital object’s identity is defined by its being-in-the-milieu
All accidents become element of relations
Substance is not an engineering question

Remarks
Remark 1: what we have been talking about are Discursive Relations, which we can actually identify with Hume’s philosophy of relations.
Remark 2: there are other type of relations, which I call Existential Relations, Martin Heidegger is a philosopher of existential relations though he refused

Part III: Mind

Mind
Tim Berners-Lee: Global Mind
Turing: can machines think?
intelligence simulation
Can we think with machines?
social computing

I think
Rene Descartes: cogito ergo sum
I think= substance
“ I think” to Kant is “not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented.”
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Kant’s Categories

Social Categories
At the root of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of understanding: ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame, which encloses all thought… They are like the framework of the intelligence
Durkheim, The Elementary Form of Religious Life, 1915:9

Thinking
Creation of digital objects through ontologies: a global schema
Digital objects as tertiary retention, which conditions I think (Bernard Stiegler)
Machine functions intrude into the flux of consciousness

Remark
Remark 3. Clark and Chalmers’ Extended Mind: cognitive process is outside the skull.
Remark 4. Digital Objects as tertiary protention

http://digitalmilieu.net	327
http://web-and-philosophy.org	86
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Yuk Hui: What is a digital object?

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