It was as if the chapter Flat Ontology was written in response to my previous blog post.
Initially, I interpreted objects of our reality in a hierarchal structure, where one object was ultimately ‘more real’ than the other. However, the opening sentence of the chapter – all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally – literally blew my mind, resulting in me writing the quote as my Facebook status and creating a social implosion within my computer’s internal world. * See image below
This chapter made me realise that by applying a hierarchy to beings, my own ontology applies posthumanist ideas, which then results in correlationist conceit – something which I definitely do not want to be identified with. What Flat Ontology does thus, is make us realise that there is no ‘super object’ and therefore no object that proves worthy of deciding the power of things within our reality. Therefore, granting “all objects the same ontological status” (pg 12). This bridges the gap between the two most present and contradicting idealogies of the contemporary world – scientific naturalism and social relativism. Scientific naturalism’s assumption that one can discover reality through scientific persistence, whereas social relativism’s focus on the descent of machination in human society and its impact on the now, both hold out-dated correlationist views despite the fact that they’re used currently. As both think from a human standpoint, that is the theories are developed by human surrounding humans, they leave out the entirety of an object’s right and agency, not only within the limit of human contact but also within the contact of it with other objects.
However, the Turing Test further shows how that even when we are mindful to take into consideration the agency of an object, one still employs the characteristics and therefore limitation of human ideology. How can we test the true agency of a computer’s computerism if we compartmentalise its agency with human terminology (‘think’)? How accurately can we study and believe to understand the ‘truth’ to dogs, when the only thing that knows the truth to a dog is the dog itself, which we are unable to communicate with?
Thus, Flat Ontology seeks multitudinous truths, making it “less likely to fall into the trap of system operational overdetermination” consequent to human reasoning.
*
