Lab
Center for philosophy and ethical governance of innovation
Institution: Southeast University
About the lab
Center for philosophy and ethical governance of innovation is a multidisciplinary research group working with various issues in the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. The lab is based in the School of Humanities of the Southeast University (Nanjing, China). The laboratory studies possible impacts that digital technologies may have on Chinese society in the future. By doing this the laboratory aims to provide a well-balanced approach to technological development and implementation of novel technologies.
The work of the laboratory has been supported financially by the Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China: “The philosophy of technological innovations and the practical logic of Chinese independent innovation”. Grant number: 19ZDA040.
The work of the laboratory has been supported financially by the Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of China: “The philosophy of technological innovations and the practical logic of Chinese independent innovation”. Grant number: 19ZDA040.
Featured research (5)
Our connection with technology begins in early childhood and increases throughout our whole life. For example, in the UK 33% of 3–4-year-olds and 92% of 12–15-year-olds access the Internet, and across Europe the number of children having a smartphone increases by 58% for each year they become older. Relatively similar numbers may be found in other ‘high-tech’ countries. Digital technologies actively participate in our breeding, education, and training. Technology becomes ubiquitous spreading through various societal domains, transforming our everyday practices and mundane routines. Today’s domain of education isn’t an exclusion. Old models, in which the teacher explains the subject in the classroom and the students complete the exercises at home, are slowly replaced by new learning approaches such as distant learning, mobile learning (m-learning), personalized learning, game-based learning, etc. All these novel learning approaches became possible by new technological solutions. AI is one of them.
Today’s digital technologies make a vital impact on our ways of being together by shaping the distance between people, transforming modes of communication among different countries, creating new opportunities to stay ‘in touch’ with others. However, these technological benefits become possible only when humans know how to be ‘together’ with technology in the first place.
From the very outset, our being together with technologies includes our bodies. In such a way, ‘human-technology’ relations are first and foremost bodily and tactile. Moreover, every usage of technology – although it is a simple tool like a hammer or a complex technological artifact like a smartphone – needs training. In such a way, usage of technology regularly includes a learning component. To get real benefits from transformations that digital technology brings into play users have to ‘reshape’ his/her behavior due to the requirements of the technology in question. This reshaping of behavior usually involves all the spectrum of bodily/cognitive abilities and bags for various training strategies. The phenomenological approach might help to conceptualize and clarify the real impact that digital technologies have on our experience.
This paper aims to highlight the life of computer technologies to understand what kind of ‘technological intentionality’ is present in computers based upon the phenomenological elements constituting the objects in general. Such a study can better explain the effects of new digital technologies on our society and highlight the role of digital technologies by focusing on their activities. Even if Husserlian phenomenology rarely talks about technologies, some of its aspects can be used to address the actions performed by the digital technologies by focusing on the objects’ inner ‘life’ thanks to the analysis of passive synthesis and phenomenological horizons in the objects. These elements can be used in computer technologies to show how digital objects are ‘alive.’ This paper focuses on programs developed through high-order languages like C++ and unsupervised learning techniques like ‘Generative Adversarial Model.’ The phenomenological analysis reveals the computer’s autonomy within the programming stages. At the same time, the conceptual inquiry into the digital system’s learning ability shows the alive and changeable nature of the technological object itself.
Medical imaging technologies form a backbone for today’s medical domain and, at the same time, propose some promising intellectual insights into the nature, functions, and disabilities of the human body. Perhaps, the easiest way to identify imaging technologies is by pointing to some of them. Everyone has faced X-Ray, ultra-sound scanning, magnetic resonance, computer tomography at least once in a life. All these medical technologies help us to peer inside the living body and provide us with a realistic representation of its parts. Such image representations are widely used in today’s AI medicine where the algorithm analyzes the image and provides a doctor with a decision about a patient’s bodily condition.
Postphenomenologically speaking, such medical technologies produce a hermeneutic function. They interpret our body and by so doing reveal newly visible phenomena that were invisible (or inaccessible) previously. Moreover, they provide us with access to some body parts that we did not have without these technologies before. I can never ‘take a look’ at my brain (or other inner organs of my body) from ‘the outside’ because I am, phenomenologically speaking, ‘inside’ of my body. This ‘inside’ experience refers to my subjective bodily experience while an ‘outside’ perspective, provided by medical technologies, represents an objective, scientific view of my body.
However, such an ‘access’ is never direct but technologically mediated. A concrete medical image that became possible because of this technological mediation can never represent a part of my body in its totality. Medical image is always a result of interpretative reduction when, for example, a computer program filters unnecessary components and highlights the most significant ones. That is why the medical image represents our organs in a way that is quite different from our every day, subjective experience. Said differently, after technological mediation my organs are represented in a way that is not immediately clear to me. To ‘extract’ this meaning from the image we need a professional doctor who has to accomplish the ‘second-level interpretation’, namely, to explain what does this image represents.
Here is where several philosophical issues occur. One among many is the problem of representation. To put it simply, how close is a technological representation to our real body condition? Even more sharply: to which extend medical image may represent the human body at all? Non-representationalistic view claims that imaging technologies represent our body only partially and will never succeed in a complete representation. In such a perspective, a patient’s health remains technologically inaccessible. The representationists, in contrast, would suggest that imaging technologies represent our body in its true nature and support us in creating precise scientific (medical) knowledge. Postphenomenology, in its turn, stands somewhere ‘in-between’ these two approaches. It claims that technological mediation is never neutral which is why the representation of our body at the image is always ‘constructed’ by technological hermeneutics. Because of this technological interpretation, the body at the image is represented differently from our subjective experience.
The philosophy of technology is faced with theoretical and practical questions after the empirical turn. Kroes and Meijers proposed that the next step of the philosophy of technology is an axiological Turn. The axiological turn can be divided into a descriptive and normative axiological turn. The descriptive axiological turn is consistent with the empirical turn in both the research goal and approach, which can be seen as the continuation of the empirical turn. The normative axiological turn that takes a normative position is radical and faces the challenge of Hume's problem. Although many philosophers of technology call for the axiological turn, whether this turn is possible and how to realize it requires further consideration.