Kaiyan Da

This article aims to talk about the new challenges of free time in the future society. In the future society, humanity’s physical and mental work will be liberated, and thus humans will have more free time. However, poor utility, management, and creation of free time will result in salient problems to hinder human development, in which the improper allocation of free time, the low quality of free time, and the fragmentation of free time will greatly challenge human development in the future society. The conclusion of this article is that free time is a very critical part of realizing the free and all-round development of all humans, so how we face the three new challenges and learn to use, manage, and create free time is not only an urgent task but also a philosophical question for us to deeply ponder.

This paper aims at a particular love for God in the human exploration of knowledge (including philosophy and science). Here, “a particular love for God” does not mean something related to religion but a way of thinking to pursue perfection, eternity, and absolute ultimateness because God is considered the only infinite, self-caused, and unique substance of the universe. On the one hand, this kind of thinking paradigm is good for people because it guides people to pursue love, beauty, and all perfect things in theory and practice; however, on the other hand, it is too simple, naïve, and extreme because the existence and evolution of the world is very complex and full of multidimensional and multilayered uncertainties and randomness. The conclusion of this article is that the world is not merely a counting machine, so we should abandon the thinking way of loving God and rationally embrace the uncertainties and complexities the future world will bring to us.

This paper aims to propose a new form of human development: informational development. Informational development, different from traditional human development, focuses on understanding, interpreting, and promoting human development in terms of information and informational relations. “Informational” here is not only a word denoting something related to data in information science & library science, but also a state, a way, or a form of human development opposing to “material”. According to the Chinese philosophy of information, all things are composed of matter and information, so there are two forms of human development, i.e., material development and informational development accordingly, but we have never noticed the informational development before. In this paper, I have provided the philosophical arguments for informational development in five aspects, including ontology, epistemology, evolution theory, thinking theory, and value theory. The conclusion of the paper is, informational development is a new form of human development, which is suitable for humans to survive and develop in the future society, so we should focus on the informational changes, examine the informational contents, and grasp the informational state of human development, and understand, interpret, and promote human development in terms of information and informational relations, thus finally achieving the free, all-round, and sustainable development of all humans.

Purpose: By introducing the basic concepts and theories of the philosophy of information created by Kun Wu, and making some comparisons of the philosophy of information and related information theories between Wu and other scholars, this paper aims to have Chinese philosophy of information widely known and understood by more people in the world, thus promoting the international exchanges between Chinese and Western scholars on the topic of philosophy of information.Design/methodology/approach: The main research methods used in this paper are the literature review and the comparative study. On the one hand, it reviews some related concepts and theories in Kun Wu's academic works of philosophy of information. On the other hand, it compares the thoughts and viewpoints of Kun Wu with those of other scholars.Findings: First, Kun Wu is the first person who has established a complete and comprehensive theoretical system of philosophy of information in China; second, Kun Wu's philosophy of information is significant in originality and value, which could be thought as the intellectual quintessence of information age, thus worth learning. Third, with more international exchanges, Chinese philosophy of information created by Wu will surely be more and more influential in philosophical circles at home and abroad.Originality/value: It is a very valuable first-hand material for Western scholars to know and understand Chinese philosophy of information.

When we enter intelligent society, we need to rethink about the topic of human essence. As we know, human beings have no absolute, fixed essence. The essence of human beings is the combination of an innate substrate and acquired creation. As the degree of machine intelligence in the development of human society continues to increase, human beings are constantly changing and creating their own essence, and they are also constantly liberated from the bondage of a certain single old essence, creating and enriching the richer and more diverse aspects of its essence. The transformation of labor from its alienation to its return is also a transformation of labor from the centralized form to the non-centralized form of human essence according to Karl Marx. The new fusion of artificial intelligence and bioengineering will lead to a new track of evolution that “reshapes and regenerates” life itself. This new evolutionary path will fuse the two-track evolution, biological evolution and cultural evolution, which have been relatively isolated in the traditional sense. If human beings are able to work hard together to design and implement a new social system that adapts to the future intelligent development, then the comprehensive development of intelligence that human beings bring about would be not a disaster, but a bright future.

As the degree of intelligence in social development increases, the future society will present new features. For example, the necessary labor time for humans will be greatly shortened. The direct result of this is the rapid growth of unemployed people. Many jobs in the future society will be replaced by intelligent machines, and a differentiation of new social stratification will emerge, bringing new social problems and new institutional appeals. The innovations of this article are: first, “the rapid growth of the unemployed people is a great progress of society” is the creative idea of this article, which is different from the views of many economists; second, this article envisions a differentiation of a new social stratification of the future society—the base stratum, the middle stratum, and the top stratum—and analyzes the social problems brought about by the differentiation of new social stratification; third, this article puts forward the institutional appeal of a shared society based on the principle of economic distribution of “social security + distribution according to labor”, and proposes reasonable philosophical suggestions for the future development of humans.