Fellow Prof. Dr. habil. Christine Blättler

Modeling in Zones of In-/Determination

In the Digital Age human beings are confronted with technological dynamics which reconfigure the relation between human agency and technological momentum, expressed by the ambiguous formula of a „power of technology“, too. The idea of technology as a means for human ends has been challenged profoundly with digital technologies. Computer based modeling is an illustrative example for this dynamic as it produces knowledge and generates effects which often entail unintended consequences difficult to comprehend. Here some authors see technological determinism at work and others a creative potential of the unforeseeable, sometimes even favoring such arrangements as examples of dynamics not any more dominated by human reason. This project explores these zones of determination and indetermination in the light of the mathematically defined, produced and processed knowledge of contemporary computational modeling via philosophically informed reasoning.