“In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein states that ‘the world and life are one’, so perhaps the following can be said. Just as the aesthetic object is the single thing seen as if it were a whole world, so the ethical object, or life, is the multiplicity of the world seen as a single object” (Diané Collinson, “The British Journal of Aesthetics”, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer 1985, pp. 266–272).
This paper advances “Metamorphosis – Ethics and Aesthetics are One – from a Neuroscientific Perspective II” (2025). It re-examines character (nature) and property from a 21st-century perspective. It addresses the intersectionality between virtual reality and physical space both theoretically and practically, in the context of digital materiality and its global system — human and non-human society.
Methodologically, three concepts are addressed: authorship, authority and authenticity. Authorship denotes both the creator (e.g., an equation in the natural sciences) and the discoverer (e.g., a new artistic technique). Authority is grounded in judgement: who has the authority to determine that this ‘R’ is art, is true, is fact? Authenticity is requisite in both domains, yet governed by divergent norms — objectivity and reproducibility in science, subjectivity and singularity in art. This discrepancy constitutes the central methodological problem of the paper.
KEYWORDS: transversality; interaction; post-conceptual; assemblage; diversity; randomness