anthropology

READING THE PRESENT

By Pierre Lévy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Our everyday life is changing at a frightening pace. Do we still live in reality, or in a hyper-reality? What is becoming of truth? Has the present, reverberating through our networks, devoured duration itself and the very notion of temporal perspective? Are we condemned toLire la suite « READING THE PRESENT »

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Abstract This article reflects on the transformation of personhood in the digital age, drawing on an invariant anthropological schema — the hermeneutical cross — which articulates an existential axis (natural person / transcendence) and a hermeneutical axis (corpus / interpretive keys). Three historical regimes succeed and stratify one another: the manuscript regime, centred on aLire la suite « ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION »

Symbolic Manipulation: an Anthropological Perspective

The aim of this article is to elucidate the anthropological conditions of possibility for computing. I will first show how symbolic manipulation is constitutive of hominization. Secondly, I will examine the gradual widening of the gearing between the sensorial world (signifiers) and the intelligible world (concepts) during cultural evolution. Following on from these analyses, I’ll comment some of the main features of contemporary digital civilization, including the development of generative artificial intelligence.