Digital Competencies and Technologies of New Sincerity in the Web 4.0 Era

The problem of social aggression of young people that are immersed in digital communication has become the subject of this study. The authors did not confine to the state of the depressing condition of the ethical sphere in digital communication. They wanted to find out the underlying causes of the social antagonism and the conflict. One of the most important reasons for social destruction is the lack of clear space-time coordinates for a virtual subject. It leads to the use of the passive personality by the technologies themselves. A man turns into material for algorithms, and his psychophysics becomes a continuation of impersonal technology. This situation characterizes the formation of a new era of Web 4.0, which the authors call counter communication. Interactivity is a thing of the past. Technologies of new sincerity come to its place. Outrageousness, detabooing, use of eroticism are forms of communicative use of a virtual subject who, in the modern communicative space, is in a state of unrelenting tension, which only changes its mode in connection with all new reasons for exaltation. The study of the psyche of young people completely immersed in the virtual world has become a confirmation that virtual ethics is moving further and further from the traditional ethical principles. Their social skills, as well as social protection, were the lowest among the various groups of young people. Communication for them ultimately turns into a persistent search for entertainment, into a striving for a hedonistically comfortable environment, into denial of socially significant topics and problems.

Centres without Sensibility

A fundamental claim in Pessoa’s philosophy is that selves are grounded in fields of experience. What, though, if there are no sensations? This very possibility, which seems at first sight to be wholly unavailable to Pessoa, is exactly what is countenanced by the eleventh-century Central Asian philosopher Avicenna. Avicenna says that one can imagine a human being who is created out of nothing flying through the air but having no sensory perceptions. However, there is a phenomenological field, and so a type of centrality, available even to the flying man. A positional conception of self can be grounded in the centrality of a purely cognitive phenomenology. If a purely cognitive landscape of presence is a possibility, then so too is a virtual subject, a heteronym, whose manner of experiencing is purely cognitive.

Orthonyms as Shadow Selves

Fernando Pessoa has introduced the term ‘heteronym’ for the coterie of virtual subjects whose identity he variously assumes. Within this group there is one whose name is ‘Fernando Pessoa’. When Pessoa writes about someone called ‘Fernando Pessoa’ he is employing an orthonym, and doing so precisely because within the imagined scenario he is not Fernando Pessoa. An orthonym, like a heteronym, is a virtual subject, but it is one which stands in a distinguished relationship with a simulating subject. The concept of an orthonym explains that of a literary doppelgänger.

Virtual Subjects

Our task now is to talk about the types of entity which occupy the central position. What occupies that position? Given that it is evidently a self or subject which does so, the task is to say more about the nature of selves. What makes Pessoa’s heteronymic philosophy of self so fascinating is, precisely, that it stands as much opposed to both the Cartesian and the animalist pictures as it does, evidently, to the Humean account of selfhood. Heteronyms are virtual subjects. A virtual subject is an abstract entity, and there is a standard way to introduce and define abstract entities of any type. This is the method of definition by abstraction, first proposed by Gottlob Frege.

Heteronyms as Virtual Subjects

The authorial act of heteronymic self-transformation is quite different from that of inventing a character in a story. What is fundamental to the notion of a heteronym is that it is an othered I, ‘lived by the author within himself’, that is to say, lived first-personally. A heteronym is not a character because the relationship an author stands in to an invented character is a third-personal one. A closer analogy would be with one of those stories in which each section has a different narrator writing from a first-person position, such as Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Yet a sequence of distinct narrators writing in the first person is still not a display of heteronymy: they are distinct characters taking it in turn to speak about themselves. When one dreams it is not uncommon for one to oneself figure in the dream, as the one to whom the events in the dream are presenting. The ‘subject-within-the-dream’ is both a virtual subject and a simulation of the dreaming subject; and for this reason it would be entirely appropriate to describe the subject-within-the-dream as the dreaming subject’s heteronym in the dream. The idea of heteronymy is also well-captured in Yasumasa Morimura’s multiple self-portraiture under the assumed identities of famous historical artists.

The Revolution of Virtual Practice

<p class="a"><span lang="EN-US">Virtual practice is a new form of human practice, it is an important change in previous human practice. It is composed of the virtual subject, virtual object and virtual intermediary. With the development of virtual practice, virtual cognition makes epistemology changed radically. Discussion on virtual practice is a hot issue in the philosophy of virtual reality. The discussion is mainly focused on the virtual practice, the composition of virtual practice and virtual cognition.</span></p>

A database of virtual healthy subjects to assess the accuracy of foot-to-foot pulse wave velocities for estimation of aortic stiffness

While central (carotid-femoral) foot-to-foot pulse wave velocity (PWV) is considered to be the gold standard for the estimation of aortic arterial stiffness, peripheral foot-to-foot PWV (brachial-ankle, femoral-ankle, and carotid-radial) are being studied as substitutes of this central measurement. We present a novel methodology to assess theoretically these computed indexes and the hemodynamics mechanisms relating them. We created a database of 3,325 virtual healthy adult subjects using a validated one-dimensional model of the arterial hemodynamics, with cardiac and arterial parameters varied within physiological healthy ranges. For each virtual subject, foot-to-foot PWV was computed from numerical pressure waveforms at the same locations where clinical measurements are commonly taken. Our numerical results confirm clinical observations: 1) carotid-femoral PWV is a good indicator of aortic stiffness and correlates well with aortic PWV; 2) brachial-ankle PWV overestimates aortic PWV and is related to the stiffness and geometry of both elastic and muscular arteries; and 3) muscular PWV (carotid-radial, femoral-ankle) does not capture the stiffening of the aorta and should therefore not be used as a surrogate for aortic stiffness. In addition, our analysis highlights that the foot-to-foot PWV algorithm is sensitive to the presence of reflected waves in late diastole, which introduce errors in the PWV estimates. In this study, we have created a database of virtual healthy subjects, which can be used to assess theoretically the efficiency of physiological indexes based on pulse wave analysis.