This week I learned about information philosophy, most notably the work of Luciano Floridi. In this day and age of data and digitalization, he develops an ontology and ethics based on reality-as-information. Virtual worlds geeks will appreciate how the professor also refers to Second Life (and other virtual environments), for instance in his book The Fourth Revolution. He writes about “the infosphere”, “inforgs or information organisms”, being “onlife”.
When I think about Second Life or similar worlds, I consider them as a kind of cyberspace, but the interesting thing about the notion of Infosphere is that the cyberspace is just a part of it. Even so virtual worlds are revealing as these are environments where people acutally live. These days the digital and virtual are blending more and more with the physical reality, inspiring information philosophers to develop an object oriented approach on the basis of “information”: humans, organizations, animals, plants, objects can be studied as information objects with specific functions or methods.
I’m reading now The Fourth Revolution and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information.
Floridi is also a must-follow thinker on Twitter.
This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International