AFTER ARISTOTLE: THE METAPHYSICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION

Contemporary information and communications technology (ICT) rests on ontological commitments that challenge traditional conceptions of the moral meaning of human existence. Information science challenges Aristotelian conceptions of human nature that are influential in Christian and Jewish natural law ethics. The breakthrough was achieved in the 1940s by a researcher named Claude Shannon. He developed a mathematical description of digital information that is related to Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and quantum information theory. It is foundational for contemporary scientific understandings of ontology, space-time, and cosmological origins. Today, information science describes a wide variety of physical, biological, and social processes, including the workings of the cosmos, the structure and growth of the biological organisms, and the evolving systems of sociality. Coming to terms with the ontological significance of information science is one of the greatest challenges to religious conceptions of moral meaning.

Some contemporary philosophers, like Luciano Floridi, argue that information science represents a Copernican Revolution that decenters the human, who is no longer the only creature capable of using information or making calculations. Now human beings are on equal ontological status with other living creatures and are now viewed as dynamic information systems without a stable essential nature and, therefore, without a metaphysically teleological conception of flourishing. Natural scientists can describe human beings with probabilistic accounts of distinguishing relations among and between information structures. This new understanding of human life is incompatible with Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics that has been arrogated by Christian and Jewish natural law ethics. Natural law ethics must now contend with these ontological claims. Alternatives to Aristotelian thought exist that must be considered. Information science has sparked renewed interest in relational realism and has supported projects like object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and the New Materialism, associated with Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda’s readings of Gilles Deleuze and A.N. Whitehead.