Tele-detection and Tele-presence: Approaching the Reality of Material Objects
Tele-detection and Tele-presence: Approaching the Reality of Material Objects

Summary/Abstract: Starting from Aristotle’s reflections, the paper discusses the possibility and the actuality of directly unseen material objects: not from the standpoint of ontology of objects, focusing on their persistence as such in time and space, but from an epistemological perspective, indebted to phenomenology, about the process of knowing those objects. This process begins with their seeing, but seeing as such involves two steps: detection and full visualisation. How to see distant, thus invisible objects, which may simply be inexistent? First, we discover them (on the basis of some effects and correlations of appropriable physical parameters). The core concept here is presence, however not in relation with past and future but with actuality or reality for the subject. After pointing the meaning of full visualisation, the last chapter suggests that no matter how precise is the measurement giving the tele-detection of distant material objects, they are not fully present if they are not directly felt by the sense organs, the gate to the human meanings of objects, i.e. if they are not given meanings, including practically, without being again tele-detected. However, we are used with their sketched presence, necessary step to their as many sided analysis, thus image, as it is possible; but we are not used with the tele-presence of members of the human species.

• Details
• Contents