Abstract
Emotions play a primary role in shaping human intelligence. On the other side, for machines, it is impossible to have forms of knowledge that are not programmed, managed, or piloted by humans. Furthermore, for humans, the process of learning is deeply interwoven with the emotional ground of the living condition. And for machines? We could not improve the attitude of learning in digital devices without enhancing their capacity of sensing. There is a wide consensus among scholars that smart devices can learn emotions at different degrees; however, the rising of the emotional wave in digital devices has not yet been explored. Philosophy can feel the gap by investigating whether machines sense and how. The aim of this article is to indicate a zero degree of emotional power in smart devices: this ability does not exist per se but in the interaction with humans. The Onlife world, where the real and the digital are melted together, provides machines with an environment that makes possible the existence of an enlarged sensitivity. Thus, machines also sense in a specific mode.
TopBackground
Philosophy can feel the gap by investigating whether machine sense and how. The aim of this paper is to indicate a zero degree of emotional power in smart devices: this ability does not exist per se but in the interaction with humans. The Onlife world, where the real and the digital are melted together, provides machines with an environment that makes possible the existence of an enlarged sensitivity. Through the lenses of metaphysics and system thinking an unprecedented challenge for data sciences is given. In fact, only a philosophical foundation of the big issues of this realm can bring about a change in the quality of understanding a more and more melted environment human/machines in the Onlife era.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Reason: The principle that regulates and order reality and knowledge. It allows the humans «to be distinguished from the environment in which it is immersed, while the order is mainly the result of an organization of objects (both concrete, theoretical or even mental) between which relationships are established. It follows rules, laws, prescriptions, constraints. It results from negentropy, from symmetry breaking, from self-organization. Reason has many aspects and shows different faces depending on the focus of each investigation: it is, and can be, subjective and objective, conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit, pragmatic and theoretical, argumentative and apprehensive, and much more» ( Urbani Ulivi and Fisogni, 2021 : 204).
Moral Enabler: An object (a digital device, a Pc) or an agent (a person) who addresses someone to act. It/he/her facilitates the making of an action.
System Thinking: An interdisciplinary approach aimed at investigating phenomena in terms of processes. Each phenomenon can be interpreted as «an ordered of interrelated parts whose characteristics depend both on the characteristics of the parts and on the web of their interconnections» ( Agazzi, 2019 , p. x). Each system, then, can be seen as a simple and a complex unit that interacts with the whole.
Enlarges Sensitivity: In the Onlife perspective, this term refers to an augmented capacity of sensing within the hyperconnected world.
Conduct: In philosophy conduct is a key term within the morality domain as well as ethics. It refers to the capacity for the human subject to be a moral agent. Morality deals properly with normative claims and sets of rules; ethics is more deeply related to the human agency. Thus, conduct could be also said an inclination to act freely in the direction of a final end.
Onlife: The term, coined by Luciano Floridi (2014 , 2015 ) refers to the melted environment due to the interactions between offline and online.
Sensing: In the metaphysical discourse of Thomas Aquinas is the act of grasping some essential traits of reality. This very idea has been relaunched by phenomenology: it grounds upon the idea that things/data are directly given to consciousness.