정보철학 관점에서 본 최한기의 기학(氣學)

Abstract

This study is an attempt to examine how the 'Philosophy of Information' and the 'Ethics of Information' that have emerged in contemporary society can be explained and interpreted from the perspective of East Asian philosophy, and what implications can be drawn from their loose connection. Changes in the current technological environment mean that the multilayered dimensions and elements that make up human life, and the conditions and modes of existence such as nature-life, society-culture, and technology-machine, are being recombined, reassembled, and contextualized around a different fulcrum than before. This paper will examine these new conditions from the perspective of East Asian pre-modern philosophy as an 'unfamiliar other'. In particular, this paper will compare the worldview and implications of qi from the perspective of information philosophy and ethics through the 'qi study' of Choi Hangi, a 19th century Korean scholar who sought to validate the traditional East Asian concept of qi through the Western science of his time. Choi consistently applies the concept of qi to perception and experience, the principle and operation of machines, and the functioning of society and the universe, beyond the traditional semantic network of qi. In Choi's system, all things are equal information beings, exchanging patterns and interconnected by mutual responsibility. In this sense, Choi's Qi-Study can be seen as a kind of 'the ontology of events' and 'the dynamics of information'. In it, human beings must abandon egocentrism and assume responsibility for the whole, and take ethical responsibility for the phenomena they see at each level of abstraction.