Rebooting social reality in the space of quantified symbolic objects: “ontologization of the figure”

Abstract

The article examines one side of the process of ontologization - the transformation of the symbolic world into a world of empirically detectable things and phenomena. The rationale for the thesis is that in the process of digitalization a fragment of being is replaced by its symbol, and the ontologization of “figure” appears as the emanation of the symbol in a fundamentally new fragment of existence, in the embodied semblance of a sign. This process is to be interpreted as “ontologization of the figure” - the transfer of the properties of a symbolic object (constructed as a digital quantified object and including only quantitative characteristics) into a new fragment of reality, which acquires the quality of being exclusively calculated. The conclusion is that the “figure” as an abstraction and phenomenon of consciousness can move from the ideal to the material state and begin its own existence through inclusion into human activity as a symbolic tool of practice, having a dominant effect on the material-subject world and on human behavior. The ontologization of “figure” culminates in the recoding of the properties of real objects and properties of human bodies with physical and psycho-physiological properties into their alternative abstract digital counterparts.