Forouzanfar, Arya
(2024)
Technologies of control and the condition of being-plugged-in: resituating Nozick’s experience machine through Heidegger, Kant, and Arendt.
Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This paper explores how technology can be viewed as more than just an instrument and how this conceptual reframing reveals various ways in which our thoughts, behaviors, and the realm of human affairs as a whole are acted upon and significantly altered. Through the process of setting up Nozick's (2006, 2013) experience machine as an analogy for technology, we can observe the ways technology acts on us epistemically and ontologically, and how the technological mediation of experience isn't something that need be reserved for a hypothetical. Instead, this paper charts this mediation as occurring throughout history and becoming more frequent in its occurrence — we've been plugging-in for millennia and the recent trends indicate the movement towards a state of living where plugging-out is no longer an option — and this comes with drastic changes to our understandings of autonomy, agency, and freedom, and with even greater implications for the near future. The extension of this analogy reveals multiple conceptual tools that can assist in our discussions regarding human-machine relations, such as the different types of plugging-in (nascent, primary, secondary, intermediary), how this has historically developed and the continuum that can be drawn from it, the endpoint of being locked into the condition, concepts like phenomenological alienation, tethered freedom, and doptography that arise through deeper investigations into these relations, and how these challenge key Western accounts of freedom.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
16 December 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
2 December 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
16 December 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
10 December 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
2 year -- Restrict access to University of Pittsburgh for a period of 2 years. |
| Number of Pages: |
170 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
David C. Frederick Honors College |
| Degree: |
BPhil - Bachelor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Undergraduate Thesis |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
plugging-in, technological mediation of experience, experience machines, tethered freedom, doptography, control societies, modes of understanding, phenomenological alienation, standing-reserves, dovetailing, interfaceability, augmentative desire, the continuum of plugging-in, the condition of being-plugged-in, total certainty, simulations, amoral daemons |
| Date Deposited: |
16 Dec 2024 14:02 |
| Last Modified: |
16 Dec 2024 14:02 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/47213 |
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