Understanding Digital Events: Process Philosophy and Causal Autonomy
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Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2020 Understanding Digital Events: process philosophy and causal autonomy David Kreps Frantz Rowe Jessica Muirhead University of Salford LEMNA, Nantes University and Wrexham Glyndŵr University [email protected] KTO, SKEMA Business School [email protected] [email protected] Abstract break-neck speed. But even if everything was good, and all digital and social media technologies were This paper argues that the ubiquitous digital designed with the utmost care, we argue that there is networks in which we are increasingly becoming still too much of it: that it is possible to be immersed present a threat to our ability to exercise overwhelmed by too much of a good thing! We argue that digital events may be happening free will. Using process philosophy, and expanding continuously in a way that we must better understand if upon understandings of causal autonomy, the paper we are to investigate and possibly mitigate negative outlines a thematic analysis of diary studies and consequences. We first provide a philosophical interviews gathered in a project exploring the nature of position on the nature of an ‘event,’ and then consider digital experience. It concludes that without what may be described as a ‘digital event.’ In the next mindfulness in both the use and design of digital section we describe a continuum between polar devices and services we run the risk of allowing such positions on how human actors and technology services to direct our daily lives in ways over which we interact [24]. We then outline our methodology and are increasingly losing control. provide examples from the empirical data and a thematic analysis that supports our claims.1 In the last section we seek to propose what might be done to 1. Introduction counter the problems we have identified. The deployment of digital and social media 2. Lenses for understanding digital events technologies is increasingly being understood as an ethical issue [34] with negative intended [14] and In this section, we lay out the features of the series negative unintended consequences [39, 41]. In this of lenses, through which we examine the nature of an paper we argue that immersion in ubiquitous networks ‘event,’ and then what we understand as a ‘digital of digital devices that take part in co-directing our lives event.’ Firstly, our analysis is based in the process risks overwhelming the director within us. To counter philosophy of Henri Bergson and Alfred North this risk IT mindfulness [22, 36, 42, 7, 38] is needed, Whitehead, and their focus upon duration, relation and and should be factored into design and use. multiplicity – upon events – rather than upon fixed We stress that we are not saying that the technology things. In addition to this, however, we also make use itself is somehow ‘bad’. Bad design is responsible for of the image of the ‘elephant and rider’ in the moral many of the issues that have been raised. However, psychology writings of Jonathan Haidt [13], and the with the number of algorithms and the increasing ‘philosophy of the flesh’ introduced by Lakoff and involvement of artificial intelligence in the running of Johnson [21], as ways of understanding Bergson and these technologies, designers are no longer necessarily Whitehead’s concerns in the language of contemporary always in control themselves: algorithms can have psychology and philosophy. unintended consequences. With the digital, users add These lenses for understanding are then further content and interact sometimes in ways unanticipated refined, for the IS community, by relating insights by designers. Mitigating risks, therefore, requires from process philosophy to the causal autonomy conscious effort, both by users, and by designers. dimension which stresses the relative role of human However, and crucially, users may be overwhelmed by actors and technology in their interaction [24]. We the digital world they inhabit, as they try to coordinate multiple independently designed digital devices while 1 This study was funded as part of a British Academy Mid-Career they do not and cannot have the competencies to do so, Fellowship awarded for the duration of 2018 to David Kreps. as the world of the digital continues to innovate at http://www.concrescence.org.uk/ URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/64492 978-0-9981331-3-3 Page 6133 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) outline a continuum between pure Human Sovereignty making itself up as it goes along, a ‘creative evolution,’ (HS) and complete Technological Autonomy (TA), (the title of Bergson’s most famous book. [2]) with the understandings of sociomateriality somewhere Mechanistic time, crucially, like all equations, can in the middle, and the notion of ‘infomateriality’ [18] run forward or backward. Yet the nature of succession closer to the Technological Autonomy end. We in consciousness flows only forward. As Bergson propose some refinements to this continuum supported insists, this durational “succession exists, I am by the empirical data from the project. We also make conscious of it; it is a fact” [2, p. 368] - and it is when use of Mark Coeckelbergh’s framing of the digital as a free will is exercised. Our memory assists us with space in which technology is increasingly responsible weighing up different potential routes, and then we for some co-direction of our lives [10]. choose, and action unfolds. From this, Bergson goes on to elaborate a universe on the model of consciousness, 2.1 Process philosophy acknowledging that, for it to exist at all, it must have been implicit from the very beginning [3, 35]. The two ‘fathers’ of process philosophy were 2.1.2 Whitehead. Whitehead’s cosmology and French philosopher Henri Bergson, and British metaphysics include his four-dimensional geometry in mathematician and philosopher Alfred North which the process of concrescence – or gradual coming Whitehead. They propose ‘event-ontologies’ to be and passing – of Actual Occasions into Objective [23, p. 232], in contrast to the ‘thing-ontology’ that is Data is described, and an organic philosophy that the prevailing world view; i.e. they contend that results from this process-relational ontology. For ‘things’ may be reduced, ultimately, to ‘events’, in Whitehead, in the simplest terms, “the future does not contrast to the more positivistic approach which seeks exist” [26, p. 4]. Whitehead represents “an effort to not only to reduce, but to eliminate ‘events’ in favour think clearly and deeply about the obvious truth that of ‘things.’ Although modern physics does not “appear our world and our lives are dynamic, interrelated to entail” such an event ontology, it is certainly processes, and to challenge the apparently obvious, but “consistent” with it [23, p. 234]. fundamentally mistaken, idea that the world (including Both philosophers seek to re-integrate ourselves) is made of things that exist independently of consciousness and personal experience into a scientific such relationships” [26, p. 8]. Once we have grasped reality they regard as having banished it. Whilst they this shift in perspective, it becomes clearer that the both try thus to bridge the gap between subject and building blocks of reality are no longer fixed things but object, Bergson errs somewhat on the side of the must be recognised as sets of interrelated events. subjective, and Whitehead somewhat on the side of the Whitehead’s geometry constitutes a fourth – and objective. Bergson is thus the braver and more radical better – description of reality than the three competing philosopher, focussing on the facility of free will and views in quantum mechanics: (i) that reality is its place within the universe. particulate, with wave-like properties, (ii) that reality is 2.1.1 Bergson. Of all Bergson’s core ideas, the wave-like, with particulate properties, and (iii) that durée reélle may perhaps be regarded as his primary nature, so determined by the means by which we study insight: an understanding of the nature of time it, e.g. giving us position but not momentum if studied published as his first book, Time and Free Will [1]. one way, or momentum but not position if studied For Bergson the will is intimately linked both to another, is so uncertain that it is simply not “capable of consciousness and to duration. Free will – the ability to fundamental characterisation at all” [11, p. ix]. The choose between different possible courses of action – fourth approach is to focus on becoming, rather than is, for Bergson, an ontological quality of time being, as Whitehead does in his philosophy of events, understood as consciously experienced duration in created at the same time that Einstein (i), which we play a part - the durée reélle. In mechanistic Schrödinger (ii) and Bohr (iii) were creating their own physics, Bergson argues, by contrast, time is a property views. of a deterministic causal closure, whereby all macro In Whitehead’s organic philosophy “everything phenomena result inescapably from micro phenomena, experiences” [33, p. 21]. In his view, “Biology is the and we – the observers – are absent, epiphenomenal, study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the impotent. This mechanistic universe could run from study of the smaller organisms” [43, p. vi]. He thus beginning to end in 3 seconds or 3 trillion years: it refuses to restrict sentience to the higher mammals and would make no difference. Bergson’s durée reélle, insists that “every singular actuality” as it takes part in however, hinges upon ‘indetermination’: the moments the concrescence of new events “must be related to … of possibility within consciously experienced duration a world of antecedent actualities. In this regard, the when human choices can be made, and the universe actuality is a subject whose object is a world of take a different course.