Page - 15 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 3:2

15 | www.limina-graz.eu LIMINA 3:2 | Digital Transformation | Editorial tounding ambiguity and disagreement surrounding key concepts that are absolutely fundamental to any such debate. What exactly is digitisation? Or more specifically: What is virtuality, a term that is often talked about in the same breath as digitisation? Daniel Pachner examines these definitions and formulates an approach based on Gilles Deleuze that conceptually links the existential preconditions of digitality – hardware, the machine – with the user – the human – through virtuality, and opens up a different perception of the digital, away from something that holds the potential to transcend or replace humankind. The popular interpretation of “virtual reality” is closely related to the idea of “beaming”, as Georg Gasser anecdotally presents in his introduction. He examines possible frameworks for what constitutes personhood and iden- tity, and what arguments might support the widely held assumption that the status of a concrete, real-life person can be digitally represented or recreated. Is consciousness merely a phenomenon of emergence based on a neural structure that exceeds a certain threshold? Or are conscious and non-conscious entities fundamentally different from each other? And what does Christian anthropology have to say about “mind-uploading”, follow- ing Karl Rahner’s theories? This seamlessly leads us on to Herbert Hrachovec’s article: In untangling two interwoven interpretations of omnipresence, he demonstrates that the widespread analogy between the omnipresence of God according to reli- gious teachings and the telepresence of the (digitally represented) indi- vidual is in fact a misunderstanding. His considerations also touch on the parallels between omniscience as a Divine attribute and omnipresent sur- veillance of the digital lives of modern humans. Such comparisons may be a popular tool to achieve an impact, but as Hrachovec shows, it is a danger- ous one to make in today’s information society: “The defining symbol in ‘omnipresence/telepresence’ is the dividing slash.” This provides a cogent counterpoint to the following article, which presents a more technophile point of view. Sara Lumbreras and Lluis Oviedo explore whether processes of believing can be interpreted as functions of neural systems. This analogy between the brain and the computer has already been exhaustively discussed but is making a recent, differently nuanced reoccurrence in technological and philosophical discourses. An interesting shift in current developments, particularly within the context of neurobiological research (also here in Graz), is an expansion in scope from purely (bio-)technological aspects