Toward a Definition of Digital Realism: Four Explanatory Proposals

Introduction: “Get Real!”

 

“In a perfect world, I would do ________.” Many a thought experiment begins with such a conditional statement. If everything else could be equal, what host of reforms might we enact for the sake of the common good! But the fated refrain soon comes: “Get real! That would never happen,” and “we have to live in the world as it actually is.” If our present collection has as a foundational concept digital realism, then this most human of commonplaces regarding the “real world” is of paramount importance to consider. 

 

For instance, in a perfect world, I would ban all use of Artificial Intelligence for children, at least until kids are old enough to do the various rites of passage we associate with adulthood. From lofty and civic practices such as voting or defending one’s country, to the bawdy and profane ones like buying booze and smoking cigarettes, I would argue that a human who cannot be trusted with a say in the government or the capacity to hold their liquor should also refrain from the world’s most powerful rhetorical device to date. It seems ludicrous, given the power of the technology and the stakes involved, to assume that Artificial Intelligence has less formative consequences than the standard lists of adult virtues and vices. In a perfect world, I would try to do something about this.

 

And yet, I, like anyone else, must “get real” about the facts on the ground. Children, oftentimes even before they are able to read (let alone type), gain access to the technological juggernauts like Large Language Models. [1] While civic change regarding age restrictions and AI usage is possible, the forecast of such changes occurring soon seems unlikely. Nevertheless, ignoring the problem is not a reasonable option. While the ideal may be something to strive for, the question of what should occur in the here and now presses upon us.

 

Of course, the moral tension between the ideal and the practical is as old as ethical reflection itself. Aristotle famously argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that the young should not study ethics (the science of the polis), as their lack of experience—combined with the rule of the passions in youth—rendered them unfit to the rational approach necessary for such learning. And yet, the entire subsequent history of teaching ethics as a field in the West increasingly turned to lecturing students of younger and younger ages not only about ethics, but Aristotle’s very text on the subject. The reason the very words that argued they were the wrong audience for such reflections increasingly were assigned to the young? While in a perfect world it would behoove us to wait if we hoped for a more fitting apprehension of Aristotle’s system, it remains the case that others are more than willing to teach, at least implicitly, alternative and often deficient variant concepts of ethics to the young, unencumbered by principles that would constrain them to wait for more appropriate rational maturity.

Similarly, in the real world we inhabit, I would introduce children to Artificial Intelligence at an age much younger than what I would otherwise contend is anywhere near ideal. For if we do not interject credible principles into the formation of the young, others within our society will suggest uses of Artificial Intelligence on terms not only morally and developmentally spurious, but fundamentally dangerous. In a perfect world, I would let the little ones hold off on this encounter, and yet, the world we live in demands something different. Let us call considerations such as these as reflections grounded in digital realism.    

 

Thus, while it is good and well to name our approach for how the Church should engage Digital Modernity and the growing terrain of media ecology, [2] it is even more pressing to demonstrate what such an approach would look like in practice. The essays of my colleagues in this collection aim to do exactly that, and do so masterfully. Aiding in the success of their work, I offer the following four proposals as explanations leading toward a concrete and actionable definition of the term digital realism. 

 

To return to Aristotle, the following proposals derive from an analogy drawn with his famous “Four Causes,” [3] each serving as a different sense by which we may predicate the term digital realism in future cases. Both in his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle’s concern with the fact people “do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the why” leads him to delineate four types of answer to this fundamental question.[4]The material cause is “that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists.”[5] The formal cause is “the statement of the essence, and its genera.” [6] The efficient cause is “the primary source of the change or coming to rest” [7]of that in question. The final cause is “the sense of end or 'that for the sake of which' a thing is done.” [8] In an analogous fashion, we will approach the “why” of digital realism under a similar fourfold consideration.

 

In addition to Aristotle, we will also bring Marshall McLuhan’s thought to bear on the implications of these causes. [9] The synergy between the two thinkers will hopefully bear fruit through interacting with each other, as Aristotle’s concern with causes should complement McLuhan’s emphasis on effects, especially those concerning the mediums (i.e, “media) of communication. As it is often by effects we first encounter their causes, McLuhan will hopefully make more concrete what might seem conceptual at first glance. I will proceed in a different order through the causes than Aristotle first elucidated them, beginning with the simplest causes to explain, and then move to the more complex. 

 

Explanation by Way of Material Causality

 

The most straightforward “cause” regarding digital realism—indeed what serves as the “literal sense” of the term from which the comparatively more “spiritual” senses arise would be the material explanation. In this sense, one who comports themselves toward digital technologies through the lens of digital realism must evidence a particular composure toward their assessment of technology’s role in society. 

 

To begin with, it is imperative to render a sober accounting of the material reality by which digital technologies operate. By material we mean exactly those aspects of the physical substrate required for technologies to exist and operate. From the raw materials that must be mined from the earth, created in a lab, or manufactured through industrial process, digital realism attends to the fact that technologies come from the same “natural resources” that make up any other existent body taking up space in the world. Similarly, no matter how ephemeral the uses of technology may seem to human experience, the physical outlay of technology has a massive ecological and environmental footprint. The sheer physical fact of the production, use, and maintenance of all digital technologies must be the starting point of anyone committing to digital realism.

 

From this deep commitment, a resistance to easy disassociations between the physical substrate and sociological manifestations of digital realities becomes a centerpiece of such considerations. A realism that appreciates and attends to the material brute fact of such technologies will resist such reifications. This, of course, is easier said than done, and on its own would easily reduce to rival declarations of inclination toward the state of things in this arena. Surely one person’s sober account is another person’s raving ideological tirade. 

 

Thus, a digital realism paying respect to the material sense of the term will take special care to understand the state of technological realities as much as possible on the terms elucidated by those practitioners within the field. Of course, this demand cannot be an insistence on all commentators becoming self-taught engineers or programmers or neuroscientists. However, it is incumbent on those in the Church—theologians and philosophers, ethicists and canonists, Clerical and Lay—to be in dialogue with practitioners in those fields. 

 

A chief motivation for such dialogue is the avoidance of ideological capture in one’s approach to the human-technological interface. While tech utopians vastly overshoot technology’s upside, and tech dystopians dismiss the human capacity to resist succumbing to their own creations, digital realists commit to resisting both the excessive and deficient in their approach. Indeed, a good measure of their success in this task is if they are accused of alarmism by the former and naivete by the latter.   

 

Digital realism, in the material sense, is a disciplined willingness to approach the world of technology. In theological terms, incarnationally, fundamentally, as grace perfects nature, the metaphysical and theological implications of technology for human society emerge from, and not in spite of, the material substrate by which the essence of a technology first impresses its ontological fingerprint on reality. In a field of inquiry already supercharged with claims regarding the disembodied nature of digital technologies in particular, [10] it is important for an incarnational faith to insist on the immense material outlay of all technologies, not only ecologically, but in terms of the field of human factors. [11]

 

Thus, the material sense of digital realism takes a measured and watchful approach to the at-hand implications of digital technology, patiently considering the psychological and sociological impact at the bio-physical level of human existence. Marshall McLuhan highlights this fact by his vigilant emphasis on the effect of such technologies on the sensory ratios of human perception. As he puts it:

 

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience….Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity…[12]

 

For a brief example, one only has to consider the bio-physical difference between reading text on a book page in contradistinction to doing so on a back lit screen. It may seem that reading in the end is reading, but indeed subtle material differences—for instance how light affects the eye differently in both scenarios—account for varied psychological and educational effects.[13] 

 

As multiple schools of thought that are rival to Christian anthropology maintain a position prone to being reductive—particularly in the various schools of physicalism that dominate many domains of modern scientific practice—a strong temptation for those in the Church is to downplay the material effects of digital modernity. But, as disciples of the Incarnate God, our refusal to return one violence for another, even in the hermeneutic realm, is of signal importance. McLuhan’s perspective thus reminds us that physical embodiment is the anchor of human perception, and any assessment that skips this materiality will lead to fundamental misunderstandings.

 

Explanation by Way of Final Causality  

 

Moving on to the more “spiritual” senses of digital realism, let us—perhaps counter-intuitively—begin with the end, as the explanation that considers final causality is the next simplest to express. The host of examples presented in this current collection of essays serve as an indication of this simplicity. In the particular arguments of their specific works, my colleagues have wrestled with exactly the final cause (the telos, or goal) not only of digital technology, but of human nature itself, and provide in-depth considerations as to what role digital technologies in particular play in this domain. 

 

Thus, digital realism is a certain ethical composure towards human goals—the final cause of human acts—and considers the role of digital technologies in light of human flourishing. Whether any of these particular uses or instantiations of the digital medium augment or hinder said flourishing is the measure by which they are to be judged. While there is of course room to ask if there is intrinsic worth to the digital medium itself, [14] the fundamental theological consideration of digital realism poses a central question: in what ways do such realities help or hinder the love of God and the love of neighbor? 

 

As such, there is perhaps less to outline in this section, as the multiple examples found in this volume should serve as “the proof in the pudding.” Still, there are important distinctions to point out. Digital realism as final cause emphasizes the fact of the human-technology interface’s existence as a feedback loop, one with ramifications that often either exceed the stated design of the creators or reveal intent hidden from the surface level. As the erstwhile Jesuit, John Culkin, commentating on McLuhan, famously put it, “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” [15]The telos of such shaping is of elemental importance.

 

A small example (as a supplement to the other essays of this volume) should suffice for the sake of clarity. Humans created cars and roads for a purpose—to more quickly get to the end point of their journeys. However, one could forgive a time traveler for arriving in a modern city and believing that an absolute inversion has subsequently taken place. [16] What began as an aid to a different telos soon became an end all of its own. Digital realism requires an attention to such reversals of means and ends.

 

It is additionally incumbent on this perspective to avoid fragmentary or atomistic views of design which limit our delineation of problems and solutions. An ecological view of the human-technology interface is of prime importance. A solution to one problem (often the impetus to this or that invention) can often create a cascade of effects that produce new problems in different domains. Digital realism refuses to imagine these considerations as one-off thought experiments, but attends to the myriad ways sense ratio alterations at a local level affect the global level as well, thus maintaining an integrated accounting of digital modernity. 

 

Explanation by Way of Formal Causality

 

With formal causality, explanations become more complicated. Firstly, there is the question regarding in what sense digital realism can be said to have a “formal” element at all. Secondly, there is a question of prudence in approaching the sprawling philosophical debates regarding “formal realism” across multiple domains without overcomplicating the discussion. 

 

To the first question, McLuhan’s most famous saying can serve as a guide. Whatever else is meant by “the medium is the message,” [17]certainly the idea that the context (i.e. the medium) through which one encounters the content (i.e. the message) is important in a way that is often ignored. While McLuhan does not explicitly utilize the specific Aristotelian terms of form and matter [18] in a consistent way to explicate his theory [19] it is clear the two thinkers share a similar approach in conceptualizing the existence of two “fundamental pairs” when explaining reality. [20]

 

So just as the material content and effects of a technology (whether as an extension of human power to change the world or convey information) are to be objects of judgement and analysis, so too do the formal environments and shaping contexts of said technologies fall squarely within the domain of rational discourse. To risk an awkward coinage, the en-formation that occurs through the en-counter with a medium is just as important as the information sent across and through it. It is in this fundamental sense that digital realism has a formal element to be considered.      

 

For the second question, the scope of this essay does not allow for a relitigation of the centuries long ontological debate. However, granting a standard textbook entry treatment of the topic, [21] a more limited sense of the argument can be teased out as salient for this essay. Thus, as the content serves as the accidental and changeable material of which a message consists, the medium is the context which provides the formal shape that persists across multiple instances. Therefore, it can serve as at least a “semi-universal” and substantial means of formal identification regarding the type or kind or species of which individual instances belong. 

 

With these stable concepts established, digital realism speaks beyond any one specific message or technology, and insists on their constitutive nature as something more substantial than a mere aggregate of accidental qualities. It follows that the essential nature of the digital medium—shared across any one instantiation—can be said to truly exist as more than a mere nominal and organizational shorthand. Digital realism in the formal sense is a bridge into exploring the essence of the digital medium, and not just as a history of the accretion of several technological innovations.  

 

Conversely, this type of formal realism allows us to consider the message and medium as something more than dualist substances that never truly interact; neither are they a mere series where one more essential reality is “trapped” inside the other. Instead, digital realism understands that the message and the medium by which it is encountered truly participate with and through one another. Messages occurring among different mediums thus take on the subsequent shaping each medial form impresses upon it. 

 

For a human encountering the same message via different media, it is neither that the medium “alters the truth it conveys,” nor that the medium is a mere transparent conduit which is inconsequential to the person’s apprehension of the message. Instead, as the medium and the message indeed have a participatory relationship, the form of medium by which a person encounters a message reveals differing aspects and nuances of the truth, in a manner unique to each. This is due to how varying perspectives are foregrounded or backgrounded by the aforementioned sense ratios encountered and experienced by a human–and this precisely through the specific way a message is shaped by the medium in question.  

 

Beyond the philosophical implications, the formal sense’s prominence stands out even more for Incarnational theology. Messages “take on flesh” in the various media by which they are conveyed, and it is in this “embodiment” that each communicated truth becomes an individuated experience of said encounter. If we follow Thomas Aquinas’s definition of truth as “the conformity of thing and intellect,” [22] this individuation again does not imply a relativist understanding of truth, but rather accounts for the manifold perspectives different intellects take as they each become more or less adequate to the object of intellection in non-simultaneous ways. Indeed, this takes seriously both the unity of truth and the multivalent approach by which truth is communicated to the intellect through the various modal interpenetration of messages with mediums. 

 

As an example, imagine that someone sequentially encounters the work of an author, first through hearing it spoken, then reading it in a book, then watching it on television, and then clicking through it rendered on a webpage. With this understanding, one has not encountered multiple, distinct, or different renderings of the work of art, nor has one had the same exact experience through the mere happenstance of different modalities. Instead, one has encountered the same work through the individuated experience brought about due to the medium through which that story was “incarnated.”   

 

Being realist about mediums additionally allows for more ethical precision regarding the worries we may have about the mediums of communication. It avoids on one hand a “tech neutrality” that ascribes no moral weight to the medium through which a message is conveyed, while on the other simultaneously resisting easy demarcations between mediums deemed totally innocent and others marked out as utterly depraved. The formal differences are real and have concrete implications for not only the types of truths we encounter, but the ways in which such truths shape our lives. 

 

By attending to the formal reality of the digital medium, we are given the capacity to speak of the ways in which messages are shaped and subsequently shape the humans that encounter them within the digital array, for better or worse. Rather than mere naming conventions or the passing of two ontologically and hermeneutically sealed off ships in the night, digital realism at the formal level points us to the staging ground of the major points of contention in our investigations.  

 

Explanation by Way of Efficient Causality

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Efficient causality is the most complex of the four explanations, and subsequently most confusing. Even in the realm of Aristotle’s original work, the efficient cause is often misunderstood, and there is some disagreement as to the best way to define it. [23] This might prove to be the breaking point of our analogy, unless we keep in mind something fundamental about the Aristotelian tradition’s conception of efficient causation.

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An essential aspect of this type of causation cannot be forgotten: the agent of efficient causation is that by which what is potential is made actual. So no matter who might be seen as the best exemplar of an efficient cause, [24] the agent which reduces (think cooking) a host of possibilities into a single actuality (i.e. the various parts of the recipe being applied to heat and becoming a substantial unified culinary experience that equates to something more than just the aggregate flavors of the various ingredients) is the hinge to understanding efficient causality. With this firmly established, the analogy can proceed apace.

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Even with this clarification, misunderstandings still arise. It is this sense of realism specifically that is often flattened into a mere “pragmatic” approach. [25] If all we mean by the term is something similar to what is evoked by political realism in popular imagination, then what is advocated is something like a constant search for “the next best available option.” Realism becomes the description of a mere attitude, and one that sees ideals as nothing but a hedge against despair at best. “Getting real” is reduced to abiding by a rule of thumb whose use is a heuristic for choosing the best consequences among diminishing returns. 

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The echoes of our example at the beginning of the essay return: you must deal with the world how it actually is, and not how you would like it to be. This, however, ignores the fact that how one decides to actuate a potential—how one brings about something possible into actual existence— is more than half the whole. Therefore, the efficient explanation must be normative and not merely descriptive. 

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There is a sense in which the material and formal causes are primarily descriptive, and the hard work to be done is to insist on accurate descriptions of the reality in question. Final cause on the other hand is obviously normative insofar as it pertains to the ends for which human beings do anything at all. But the efficient cause can quite easily be seen as just one more additional descriptive aspect, bereft of normative weight. We instead insist that the efficient explanation is fundamentally normative, exactly because it is an architectonic question: not whether potentialities ever become actual (this is a given), but instead, in what way and by what means will one choose to actualize such potentiality? 

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It is here that the rival accounts of efficient realism regarding digital modernity take a divergent path. With the flattened misunderstanding of the term, human actors actuate realities from a host of potential outcomes that can indeed be measured as better or worse, but are quite divorced from the other three causal explanations. With digital realism, it is precisely the intentional and habitual attention to material, formal, and final explanations regarding digital modernity that will determine precisely how one will choose to actuate what is potential into reality. 

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Here again, Marshall McLuhan can help us understand what is at stake. In his essay “The Gadget Lover,” McLuhan states “any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.” [26] Human creations then are not simply reactions to circumstances in hopes of optimizing outcomes, but rather involves the material, formal, and final cause of our realities as embodied rational souls. 

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To ask why we as a species created any specific tool, from the wheel to Artificial Intelligence, is not simply to investigate what problems we thought we were attempting to fix as they arose (let alone the new problems we created in the process). Instead, what must be investigated is the manner in which potentials became actualities, i.e. to make a judgment regarding the efficient cause that brought about such a reality. In the case of the human being, that means asking what about ourselves have we extended into our creations, and as McLuhan is also intent to explore, in what way do we amputate those aspects of ourselves in the process. [27] Flattened concepts of efficient causation do not allow for such holistic considerations.

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The Unity of Explanations in Digital Realism

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To return to the example from the beginning of this essay, the claim is not that we must give up the ideal of holding young people back from using Artificial Intelligence because pragmatic considerations have altered our assessment of what is optimally available among a set of options. [28]While the common misconception understands realism to be precisely a choice of diminishing options based on our ability to predict statistically probable future outcomes, [29] digital realism demands something more integrative. 

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What is being proposed in the example of the ‘ideal’ AI ban for children is not the withholding itself—the flourishing of the human is not determined by some arbitrary age restriction regarding the usage of this or that thing. Instead, human flourishing regards the perfection of our natural bodily and intellectual powers, along with our supernatural capacity to love and serve the Holy Trinity and our neighbor. This necessitates reckoning with the final causes involved in the human-technological interface. To assess this correctly, one must explore the material reality of the technology at hand. Finally, the formal reality of the technology is not merely an object exterior to us, but an extension of our humanity, all of which demands an accounting that goes beyond the merely pragmatic. In the efficient causal reduction of potential responses into actual practice, all prior explanations are unified in a single digital realist decision regarding how we will educate children regarding artificial intelligence. 

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Digital realism–considerd under all modes of causality–must therefore be realized as a unified concept. The commitment of a moral agent to unify the material, formal, and final causal explanations of a circumstance within the digital array leads precisely to the efficient determination of an act. Thus, by a concrete action which proves the best way forward in actualizing the wisest path among potential realities, the unified approach of digital realism is enacted, and thus should be understood.

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The unity of the four causal explanations, rather than diminishing realism into a philosophy of mere accommodation to the happenstance of random circumstance, propels digital realism into a dynamic search for the thread governing and weaving all aspects of the digital array together, and is available to those patient and attentive enough to look for it. Instead of a reactionary capitulation to fate, digital realism holds that a true governance undergirds even the sublest perplexities of events pertaining to the most powerful of technological realities. Our task then is fundamentally an Aristotelian one: to determine what can be said truly about reality, and act in accordance with what is said. Ethics under digital realism thus pertains to being and act: it is more than the aggregate of considered consequences.[30]

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Theologically then, digital realism is a matter of faithfulness to concrete realities more than the evaluation of the effectiveness attendant to various notional abstractions. [31] It holds that Providence guides human affairs in the here and now, within the daily interactions we have with digital technologies. Therefore the governing impulse for those attending to these four explanations most naturally is the virtue of humility. From this humility stems not a servility, a timidity, nor an underestimation of our powers. Rather, such humility grounded in truth fructifies into a stalwart and magnanimous confidence. For realism rests on the firm assurance that we will find what we are certain is there waiting for us if we have but the courage to look: that is, Jesus Christ, who promised to be with us always, even unto this, our digital age.