The Informational Foundation of the Act

This book is an attempt to develop a new field of research that could be denominated «human act informatics». The goal is to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including the embodied acts –that we will denominate «kinetic»– and the mental and emotional acts that we will denominate «telekinetic acting». Our approach distinguishes acting from the point of view of the bits generated in human choices. More choices imply more order and less chaos. So, from our point of view, the traditional distinction of human acts as rational or irrational is less relevant. Traditional theory of economics and social science emphasizes the human act as a rational act. However, it has been also accepted that not every act performed by a human is rational; many acts performed by humans are also performed by animals. In our terminology, we call these kind of acts «vital acts», including among them the vegetative acts, the unconscious mental acts and the acts of perception and of emotion. According to tradition, vital acts are human but not specific for humanity. According to the most influential philosophical traditions, what makes an act performed by a human being distinctively a «human act», is that it is an act of will and therefore rational in character. Human acts are considered utilitarian acts of control, expressing a specific form of order that we call «culture». Consequently, vegetative acts as well as unconscious acts in general will be considered irrational. Further, only a simple step separates a utilitarian rational act from an ethical act. Therefore, utilitarian rational acts are considered moral acts too, and both economic theory and social theory are directly connected to ethics. In our research, we assume that these standpoints are insufficient and in some sense misleading. The fundamental aim of our research has been «posthuman», admitting that the unique importance of an act lies in its capacity for generating order. We then needed then to develop a methodology that allowed us to make a closer study of every act –including the «vital acts»– depending on the acting’s capacity to generate order and nothing else. In our research, we noticed that the rationality respective irrationality of acting was in fact only a function of the act’s organizational capacity. From this perspective, it was necessary to define «order» respective «disorder» as operative concepts that allowed us to compare the organizational differences generated by each kind of act. To the group of vital acts belongs the acting that embraces the spontaneity of living, as unconscious thinking, dreaming, loving, etc. and we can easily deduce that the majority of the human acts are utilitarian but in an irrational way; they are rooted in unconscious drifts and therefore we will consider them as irrational-utility acts. These irrational-utility acts are still specific «human».