THE CULTURAL BOUNDARY IN THE VIRTUALIZATION OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY: THE CHALLENGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO THE MEANING-MAKING NATURE OF COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Virtualization is one of the dominant tendencies that define contemporary society, and it is precisely in virtual reality that the specificity of cultural boundaries as a phenomenon of social complexity is revealed most fully. The article conceptualizes the cultural boundary in the virtualization of social complexity, proceeding from an understanding of virtual reality as a complexity that is part of social complexity and at the same time extends beyond it, related to it as the “complex with the complex”. It is shown that virtual culture is a project of the “human-navigator”, for whom the actual reality is the human being as a bearer of cultural meanings, who in the virtual space becomes a specific cultural “chronotope”, a “node” in the networks of communication.

Particular attention is paid to the challenge that artificial intelligence poses to the meaning-making nature of cultural communication. The emergence of communicative systems capable of conducting a dialogue almost indistinguishable from communication with another person gives rise to a fundamentally new situation in which a person enters into dialogue with a pseudosubject that imitates subjectivity without being a subject. This destruction of the presumption of the interlocutor's subjectivity has profound consequences for understanding the cultural boundary, since culture itself is grounded in communication between subjects; preserving the human dimension of virtual culture thereby becomes one of the central challenges of the present. The article also outlines the educational dimension of this problem: algorithmic systems function as a powerful “hidden curriculum” that imperceptibly reshapes the cognitive abilities and value orientations of the subject, which makes the formation of anthropological safeguards for authentic human meaning-making an urgent task.

Keywords: cultural boundary, social complexity, virtual reality, virtual culture, self-organization, artificial intelligence, pseudosubject, meaning-making, human-navigator, educational landscapes.