Embodied Consciousness and Somatic Ethics in the Digital Age

The digital transformation of the communicative environment increasingly risks reducing human beings to reactive components within technical systems. This development calls for a renewed account of the human capacity for subjective experience under contemporary technological conditions. Existing approaches to consciousness tend either toward illusionism, with its denial of mental causation, or toward some form of dualism between consciousness and matter. David Dubrovsky’s informational theory of subjective reality offers a materialist solution to the mind–body problem, but its central principle of informational invariance requires further refinement in light of recent research on the embodied and multilevel organization of consciousness. The article brings neurophysiological research into dialogue with the process-oriented ontology of Chinese philosophy. On this basis, subjective reality is understood as the dynamic activity of a living system shaped by critical patterns of neural activity, the bodily organization of experience, and the cultural environment. Such activity depends on a flexible balance between stability and responsiveness. This balance emerges in living autopoietic systems, in which higher-order forms of consciousness arise through the integration of bodily rhythms, attention, and social interaction. The algorithmic structuring of the communicative environment narrows the interval between stimulus and response, thereby intensifying behavioral reactivity and encouraging the formalization of subjectivity. By contrast, the Confucian conception of ritual can be understood as a form of embodied ethical practice that restores the temporal space required for meaningful action and incorporates somatic structures of experience into the formation of the subject. Ritual sustains the duration necessary for self-organization, attentiveness to the particularities of a situation, and the exercise of mental causation. The preservation and adaptation of traditional ritual forms, together with the cultivation of individual embodied practices, may therefore provide a means of resisting the mechanization of subjectivity in the digital age. This argument is further illustrated by the experience of integrating digital technologies into the Chinese educational system. The proposed cross-cultural synthesis contributes to the development of an account of subjectivity that recognizes the inseparability of the conscious, embodied, and ethical dimensions of human existence.

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