The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with (...) the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses. (shrink)

This paper explores the problem of how we perceive built space and the ways that we relate to its abstract representations. Poincaré presented the problem that space poses for the 20th century in his essay ‘The Relativity of Space’, in which the human body and technics are already a part of our spatial perceptions. Merleau-Ponty, the “philosopher of the body”, and Don Ihde, a philosopher of technology, ground their work on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (to different (...) degrees). For Merleau-Ponty, our primordial perception is general, pre-reflective, and ambiguous. One’s own body (body-subject) is the means of having an already inter-subjective world. Merleau-Ponty explicates our irreducible relation to the world by showing that bodily motility, the spatiality of one’s body, and habit acquisition inform our spatial experiences, as well as the syntheses of our perceptions and the unity of the world. Merleau-Ponty describes the constitution of embodiment relations (by means of habit acquisition) with artefacts that mediate our interaction and perceptions in the world. Ihde poses his intentional human-technology (artefactual) relations that transform our perceptions of the world and ourselves. These relations are ever-present in our everyday lifeworld of which built space forms the background or foreground of our projects and actions. In this paper, I provide a phenomenological explication of a specific space to test how both philosophers’ work compare to and/or supplement each other. (shrink)

This article investigates the types of intentionality involved in human–technology relations. It aims to augment Don Ihde’s analysis of the relations between human beings and technological artifacts, by analyzing a number of concrete examples at the limits of Ihde’s analysis. The article distinguishes and analyzes three types of “cyborg intentionality,” which all involve specific blends of the human and the technological. Technologically mediated intentionality occurs when human intentionality takes place “through” technological artifacts; hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological actually merges (...) with the human; and composite intentionality is the addition of human intentionality and the intentionality of technological artifacts. (shrink)

Replies to commentaries on my 2012 article ‘Synthetic Biology Needs a Synthetic Bioethics,’ note that I do not, in fact, call for some ‘new’ kind of ethics. The focus then and now is on integrating questions that relate to distributive justice and environmental quality more faithfully into the topics that have come to preoccupy mainstream bioethics as institutionalized in medical schools and medical research institutions.

In Husserl’s Missing Technologies, Don Ihde urges us to think deeply and critically about the ways in which the technologies utilized in contemporary science structure the way we perceive and understand the natural world. In this paper, I argue that we ought to extend Ihde’s analysis to consider how such technologies are changing the way we perceive and understand ourselves too. For it is not only the natural or “hard” sciences which are turning to advanced technologies for help in carrying (...) out their work, but also the social and “human” sciences. One set of tools in particular is rapidly being adopted—the family of information technologies that fall under the umbrella of “big data.” As in the natural sciences, big data is giving researchers in the human sciences access to phenomena which they would otherwise be unable to experience and investigate. And like the former, the latter thereby shape the ways those scientists perceive and understand who and what we are. Looking at two case studies of big data-driven research in the human sciences, I begin in this paper to suggest how we might understand these phenomenological and hermeneutic changes. (shrink)

Don Ihde is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the place of technologies in our lives. Over the course of a long career, he has built a unique and useful perspective by expanding on phenomenological and American pragmatist philosophy and has developed wide-ranging insights and conceptual tools for describing the details of our experience across the various areas of human activity, including scientific practice, anthropological history, computer interface, design, art history, and the technologies of everyday life. The Critical Ihde (...) brings together many of Ihde's most influential writings, as well as a number of under-recognized gems. Across these works are examples of his influential contributions to the phenomenology of human auditory and visual experience, his foundational work on the phenomenology of technology, and his thoughts on the technologies of scientific practice, including laboratory and medical imaging. Further, these chapters reveal the development of "postphenomenology," Ihde's original philosophical perspective, one that continues to flourish today across the work of a growing interdisciplinary and international collective of scholars. (shrink)

Don Ihde’s alterity relation focuses on the quasi-otherness of dynamic technologies that interact with humans. The alterity relation is one means to study relations between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, research on alterity relations has not defined the difference between playing with a toy, using a computer, and interacting with a social robot or chatbot. We suggest that Ihde’s quasi-other concept fails to account for the interactivity, autonomy, and adaptability of social robots and chatbots, which more closely approach (...) human alterity. In this article, we will examine experiences with a chatbot, Replika, and a humanoid robot, a RealDoll, to show how some users experience AI systems as companions. First, we show that the perception of social robots and chatbots as intimate companions is grounded in communication. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) allow a relationship to form between some users and social robots and chatbots. In this relationship, some users experience social robots and chatbots as more than quasi-others. We will use Kanemitsu’s another-other concept to analyze cases where social robots and chatbots should be distinguished from quasi-others. (shrink)

Within this paper, I explore the look and feel of the subjective point-of-view (POV) shot in narrative cinema and how it presents an awkward and uncomfortable space for the viewer to inhabit. It considers what David Bordwell has called the surrogate body: the concept in which viewers step into the role of an offscreen protagonist. In numerous films, this style invites the spectator to see and feel through the eyes and movement of a particular type of surrogate character, which as (...) I argue, predominantly consists of killers, victims or socially inept characters. The term I give for this particular trait in cinema is hap-tech narration, which is inspired by Laura Marks’ concept of haptic cinema. Unlike Marks’ understanding of haptic which focuses upon sensual beauty, hap-tech narration considers phenomenological uncomfortableness which is considered through Don Ihde’s philosophy of technology. This paper incorporates Ihde’s framework of postphenomenology, which considers how experientiality is changed and filtered through technological devices (which in this analysis will be the technology of the camera and the frame of the screen). Using Ihde’s postphenomenological understanding of human−technology relationships (which this work explores in detail), I consider a range of narrative films that utilise POV camerawork, including: Delmer Daves’ _Dark Passage_ (1947), Michael Powell’s _Peeping Tom_ (1960) and Julian Schnabel’s _Le Scaphandre et le Papillon_ (_The Diving Bell and Butterfly_, 2007). Each of these titles present events through the subjective gaze of a killer, victim or socially damaged character. This paper offers a rationale as to why this is the case by addressing POV through the philosophy of Ihde, enabling an understanding of hap-tech narration to be unpacked, in which viewers are placed into corrupted and damaged corporeality through the technological power of the camera. (shrink)

Objective reporting was once among the foundational norms of U.S. journalism. The emergence of alternative and economically successful partisan models exemplified by Fox News, talk radio, and a ran...

Unentwegt werden neue technische Produkte gestaltet. Doch was macht die technische Gestaltung aus? Wie lässt sich ihr Gegenstand - (noch) nicht existierende Artefakte - adäquat auf den Begriff bringen? Michael Kuhn begreift technische Ideen vor ihrer Realisierung als Fiktionen. Er bietet eine fiktionstheoretische Rekonstruktion der Gestaltungstätigkeit und entwickelt hieraus eine Ethik der Gestaltung. Der stark interdisziplinäre Zugang zwischen Technikphilosophie und Ingenieurwissenschaften liefert neue Erkenntnisse für beide Fachrichtungen und stellt wertvolle Grundlagen bereit.

Proliferating media forms, from tablets to Twitter, are changing communicative practice, delimiting new experiential horizons, and thus providing phenomenological research with novel variations on the experience of self and other. Videoconferencing via Skype or FaceTime offers prominent examples of these changing forms. Despite the use of these communication technologies in both educational contexts and everyday life, educational videoconferencing has been described in the research literature as “a hidden mode of delivery, employing invisible pedagogical techniques.” In this study I address this (...) situation of simultaneous familiarity, invisibility and uncertainty by focusing particularly on the lived experience of space, the body and eye contact in videoconferencing contexts. This study suggests that the disruption of spatial coherence and power of gaze and mutual gaze are all but unavoidable features of this experience. It concludes by emphasizing the importance forms or expressions of absence, such as the diminution of eye contact, or the importance of not always being perceived as performing or “on” in videoconferencing contexts. (shrink)

This article is concerned with two interrelated questions: what, if anything, distinguishes synthetic from natural organisms, and to what extent, if any, creating the former is of moral significance. These are ontological and ethical questions, respectively. As the title indicates, I address both from a broadly neo-Aristotelian perspective, i.e. a teleological philosophy of life and virtue ethics. For brevity’s sake, I shall not argue for either philosophical position at length, but instead hope to demonstrate their legitimacy through their explanatory power. (...) I firstly argue that synthetic organisms differ in kind from natural organisms and machines, and differ only by degree from genetically modified organisms. I then suggest that this is nevertheless sufficient to give us specific ethical reservations about synthetic biology: namely, that more than any other widely used biotechnology, it is characterised by a drive to mastery that stands opposed to due appreciation of the giftedness of life. (shrink)

Our lives are guided by habits. Most of the activities we engage in throughout the day are initiated and carried out not by rational thought and deliberation, but through an ingrained set of dispositions or patterns of action—what Aristotle calls a hexis. We develop these dispositions over time, by acting and gauging how the world responds. I tilt the steering wheel too far and the car’s lurch teaches me how much force is needed to steady it. I come too close (...) to a hot stove and the burn I get inclines me not to get too close again. This feedback and the habits it produces are bodily. They are possible because the medium through which these actions take place is a physical, sensible one. The world around us is, in the language of postphenomenology, an opaque one. We notice its texture and contours as we move through it, and crucially, we bump up against it from time to time. The digital world, by contrast, is largely transparent. Digital media are designed to recede from view. As a result, we experience little friction as we carry out activities online; the consequences of our actions are often not apparent to us. This distinction between the opacity of the natural world and the transparency of the digital one raises important questions. In this chapter, I ask: how does the transparency of digital media affect our ability to develop healthy habits online? If the digital world is constructed precisely not to push back against us, how are we supposed to gauge whether our actions are good or bad, for us and for others? The answer to this question has important ramifications for a number of ethical, political, and policy debates around issues in online life. For in order to advance cherished norms like privacy, civility, and fairness online, we need more than good laws and good policies—we need good habits, which dispose us to act in ways conducive to our and others’ flourishing. (shrink)