Foundational Issues of Technosphere Sciencee The Case for a New Scientific Discipline

Abstract

This paper submits the case for establishing ‘technosphere science’ as an independent scientific discipline that draws on results of many other disciplines, reaching from physics to the humanities, with economics as a major contributing discipline. My argument is ontological, that is I posit several fundamental assumptions about the type of entities that are studied by technosphere science and their causal relationships. This is motivated by the recognition that in the Anthropocene, the technosphere has emerged as encompassing also the biosphere, thus rendering the ontological distinction between ‘nature’ and the artificial obsolete. This requires a thorough reconsideration of the concept of ‘technology’ that combines engineering approaches with the humanities and philosophy, resulting in a new concept of ‘artefact’. This concept provides the foundation for a central ontological notion of technosphere science, distributed agency or ‘agencement’, following Actor-Network-Theory. Agency is no longer seen as a property exclusive to humans, but as emerging from networks of entities, including humans, artefacts and living systems. Hence, technosphere science draws on many general and abstract insights of various uses of the concept of ‘networks’ across many disciplines, which allows for positing distinct forms of causal processes: prominent examples include the concept of autocatalytic cycles (building on their conceptual role in explaining the transition from non-life to life) or power laws and scaling laws. On a most general level, technosphere science establishes a universal evolutionary framework that generalizes over biological evolution, and approaches technology as an evolutionary phenomenon. In this general framework, thermodynamics assumes a foundational role in approaching both the technosphere and the biosphere as consisting of entities that accumulate information that enables the utilization and expansion of energetic throughputs. This follows from the ontological determination of the technosphere as an open, non-linear and non-equilibrium system feeding on energetic throughputs. In this perspective, the human economy is the central medium by which human action is functional relative to the reproduction and growth of the technosphere. I conclude with considerations about human autonomy and ethics in the technosphere.