Against Digital Ontology

Floridi, Luciano (2008) Against Digital Ontology.

Abstract

The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the
universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully
distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural),
in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research.
Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but
digital and analogue are only “modes of presentation” of Being (to paraphrase Kant),
that is, ways in which reality is experienced and/or conceptualised by an epistemic agent
at a given level of abstraction. A preferable alternative is provided by an informational
approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge
of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour
of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with
each other. The paper is the first part (the pars destruens) of a two-part piece of
research. The pars construens, entitled “A Defence of Informational Structural
Realism”, is forthcoming in Synthese.