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2:13

(In »The three dramatic revolutions of the Internet age«)

The Cartesian subject – which we intuitively perceive as so unproblematic, it is always there waiting for us when we wake up – is in itself a skilfully orchestrated illusion, a kind of cunning fraud of the brain and body (see The Body Machines) with the purpose of economising with precious resources and creating an illusory but functional model of life. But in a scientific sense there are only fields, particles, energies and relationships. The belief systems that we construct and utilise in order to be able to navigate at all a life that is constantly becoming increasingly complex are, if anything, historically determined narratives whose memetic survival is considerably more concerned with actual relevance, the attractiveness of the narrative and social arbitrariness than with any objective degree of truth in the dogmata themselves, to the extent that anything of this kind is even possible to document. Man is the animal that is constantly on the lookout for meaning, and in the absence of results creates for himself patterns in an overwhelming flow of information, fictives that will, as far as possible, elucidate the causative links of existence. And the meaning that we succeed in producing in one way or another, we ascribe mentally and socially to the great Other, the guarantor and ultimate originator of meaning, fully in line with the Cartesian view of thinking and the thinker who must exist since the thought exists.