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Against digital ontology

Synthese 168 (1):151 - 178 (2009)

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  1. The world is either digital or analogue.Francesco Berto & Jacopo Tagliabue - 2014 - Synthese 191 (3):481-497.
    We address an argument by Floridi (Synthese 168(1):151–178, 2009; 2011a), to the effect that digital and analogue are not features of reality, only of modes of presentation of reality. One can therefore have an informational ontology, like Floridi’s Informational Structural Realism, without commitment to a supposedly digital or analogue world. After introducing the topic in Sect. 1, in Sect. 2 we explain what the proposition expressed by the title of our paper means. In Sect. 3, we describe Floridi’s argument. In (...)
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  • Cellular automata.Francesco Berto & Jacopo Tagliabue - 2012 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Cellular automata (henceforth: CA) are discrete, abstract computational systems that have proved useful both as general models of complexity and as more specific representations of non-linear dynamics in a variety of scientific fields. Firstly, CA are (typically) spatially and temporally discrete: they are composed of a finite or denumerable set of homogeneous, simple units, the atoms or cells. At each time unit, the cells instantiate one of a finite set of states. They evolve in parallel at discrete time steps, following (...)
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  • Information ethics: a reappraisal.Luciano Floridi - 2008 - Ethics and Information Technology 10 (2–3):189–204.
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  • (1 other version)What Is a Digital Object?Yuk Hui - 2013-12-13 - In Harry Halpin & Alexandre Monnin (eds.), Philosophical Engineering. Wiley. pp. 52–67.
    We find ourselves in a media‐intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this chapter proposes to (...)
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  • Models of the Universe: Ontological and Physical Problems.Iliana Vladlenova & Eduard Kalnytskyi - 2022 - Философия И Космология 28:42-50.
    The primary target of this paper is a philosophical analysis of modern models of the universe in cosmology. Understanding the existence of being is directly related to understanding both the world and oneself. An important characteristic of ontology is time, matter, space which forms the ontological horizon of presence. Ontology tries to describe the fundamental principles of our universe in a comprehensive and consistent way, but the more the system includes different levels and objects, the more difficult it is to (...)
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  • Digital Me Ontology and Ethics.Ljupco Kocarev & Jasna Koteska - manuscript
    Digital me ontology and ethics. 21 December 2020. -/- Ljupco Kocarev and Jasna Koteska. -/- This paper addresses ontology and ethics of an AI agent called digital me. We define digital me as autonomous, decision-making, and learning agent, representing an individual and having practically immortal own life. It is assumed that digital me is equipped with the big-five personality model, ensuring that it provides a model of some aspects of a strong AI: consciousness, free will, and intentionality. As computer-based personality (...)
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  • Structural Realism, Metaphysical Unification, and the Ontology and Epistemology of Patterns.Majid Davoody Beni - 2017 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 31 (3):285-300.
    ABSTRACTLadyman and Ross’s account of the metaphysical component of ontic structural realism was associated with a unificationist view of the connection between fundamental physics and special sciences. The aim of the present article is to assess the sense of unification that is at issue in Ladyman and Ross’s definition of metaphysics. Given the ontic core of Ladyman and Ross’s version of structural realism, it should be assumed that the unifying endeavour is worthwhile only if the connective links that underpin unification (...)
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  • Syntactical Informational Structural Realism.Majid Davoody Beni - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (4):623-643.
    Luciano Floridi’s informational structural realism takes a constructionist attitude towards the problems of epistemology and metaphysics, but the question of the nature of the semantical component of his view remains vexing. In this paper, I propose to dispense with the semantical component of ISR completely. I outline a Syntactical version of ISR. The unified entropy-based framework of information has been adopted as the groundwork of SISR. To establish its realist component, SISR should be able to dissolve the latching problem. We (...)
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  • Computational Dynamics of Natural Information Morphology, Discretely Continuous.Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic - 2017 - Philosophies 2 (4):23.
    This paper presents a theoretical study of the binary oppositions underlying the mechanisms of natural computation understood as dynamical processes on natural information morphologies. Of special interest are the oppositions of discrete vs. continuous, structure vs. process, and differentiation vs. integration. The framework used is that of computing nature, where all natural processes at different levels of organisation are computations over informational structures. The interactions at different levels of granularity/organisation in nature, and the character of the phenomena that unfold through (...)
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  • The Downward Path to Epistemic Informational Structural Realism.Majid Davoody Beni - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (2):181-197.
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  • (1 other version)Information, Computation, Cognition. Agency-Based Hierarchies of Levels.Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic - 2016 - In Vincent C. Müller (ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Cham: Springer. pp. 139-159.
    This paper connects information with computation and cognition via concept of agents that appear at variety of levels of organization of physical/chemical/cognitive systems – from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, life-like chemical systems, to cognitive systems starting with living cells, up to organisms and ecologies. In order to obtain this generalized framework, concepts of information, computation and cognition are generalized. In this framework, nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics, where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the (...)
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  • The Ontology of Digital Physics.Anderson Beraldo-de-Araújo & Lorenzo Baravalle - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (6):1211-1231.
    Digital physics claims that the entire universe is, at the very bottom, made out of bits; as a result, all physical processes are intrinsically computational. For that reason, many digital physicists go further and affirm that the universe is indeed a giant computer. The aim of this article is to make explicit the ontological assumptions underlying such a view. Our main concern is to clarify what kind of properties the universe must instantiate in order to perform computations. We analyse the (...)
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  • Epistemic Informational Structural Realism.Majid Davoody Beni - 2016 - Minds and Machines 26 (4):323-339.
    The paper surveys Floridi’s attempt for laying down informational structural realism. After considering a number of reactions to the pars destruens of Floridi’s attack on the digital ontology, I show that Floridi’s enterprise for enriching the ISR by borrowing elements from the ontic form of structural realism is blighted by a haunting inconsistency. ISR has been originally developed by Floridi as a restricted and level dependent form of structural realism which remains mainly bonded within the borders of a Kantian perspective. (...)
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  • There’s Plenty of Boole at the Bottom: A Reversible CA Against Information Entropy.Francesco Berto, Jacopo Tagliabue & Gabriele Rossi - 2016 - Minds and Machines 26 (4):341-357.
    “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, said the title of Richard Feynman’s 1959 seminal conference at the California Institute of Technology. Fifty years on, nanotechnologies have led computer scientists to pay close attention to the links between physical reality and information processing. Not all the physical requirements of optimal computation are captured by traditional models—one still largely missing is reversibility. The dynamic laws of physics are reversible at microphysical level, distinct initial states of a system leading to distinct final (...)
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  • Informational Realism and World 3.Donald Gillies - 2010 - Knowledge, Technology & Policy 23 (1-2):7-24.
    This paper takes up a suggestion made by Floridi that the digital revolution is bringing about a profound change in our metaphysics. The paper aims to bring some older views from philosophy of mathematics to bear on this problem. The older views are concerned principally with mathematical realism—that is the claim that mathematical entities such as numbers exist. The new context for the discussion is informational realism, where the problem shifts to the question of the reality of information. Mathematical realism (...)
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  • A Logic of Ethical Information.Joseph E. Brenner - 2010 - Knowledge, Technology & Policy 23 (1):109-133.
    The work of Luciano Floridi lies at the interface of philosophy, information science and technology, and ethics, an intersection whose existence and significance he was one of the first to establish. His closely related concepts of a philosophy of information (PI), informational structural realism, information logic (IL), and information ethics (IE) provide a new ontological perspective from which moral concerns can be addressed, especially but not limited to those arising in connection with the new information and communication technologies. In this (...)
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  • A dialogue concerning two world systems: Info-computational vs. mechanistic.Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic & Vincent C. Müller - 2011 - In Gordana Dodig Crnkovic & Mark Burgin (eds.), Information and computation: Essays on scientific and philosophical understanding of foundations of information and computation. World Scientific. pp. 149-184.
    The dialogue develops arguments for and against a broad new world system - info-computationalist naturalism - that is supposed to overcome the traditional mechanistic view. It would make the older mechanistic view into a special case of the new general info-computationalist framework (rather like Euclidian geometry remains valid inside a broader notion of geometry). We primarily discuss what the info-computational paradigm would mean, especially its pancomputationalist component. This includes the requirements for a the new generalized notion of computing that would (...)
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  • The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 27-52.
    According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...)
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  • (1 other version)What is a Digital Object?Yuk Hui - 2012 - Metaphilosophy 43 (4):380-395.
    We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article proposes to (...)
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  • The Hardware Turn in the Digital Discourse: An Analysis, Explanation, and Potential Risk.Luciano Floridi - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (1):1-7.
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  • Exploring Digital Civics: a Framework of Key Concepts to Guide Digital Civics Initiatives.Estelle Clements - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (2):1-27.
    Presenting the challenges that face digital age citizens as philosophical, as opposed to technological, this paper explores the underpinning structure of digital civics through an overview of its four foundational pillars and their informing scholarship. Through this framework and the literature that supports it, a set of five key concepts are identified as a useful guide for developing digital civics initiatives, including policy and educational interventions. In closing, this work urges the further exploration of the conceptual underpinnings of digital civics (...)
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  • A Scientific Metaphysical Naturalisation of Information.Bruce Long - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Sydney
    The objective of this thesis is to present a naturalised metaphysics of information, or to naturalise information, by way of deploying a scientific metaphysics according to which contingency is privileged and a-priori conceptual analysis is excluded (or at least greatly diminished) in favour of contingent and defeasible metaphysics. The ontology of information is established according to the premises and mandate of the scientific metaphysics by inference to the best explanation, and in accordance with the idea that the primacy of physics (...)
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  • (1 other version)ISR is Still a Digital Ontology.Bruce Long - 2018 - Erkenntnis:1-16.
    I will analyse Floridi’s rejection of digital ontologies and his positive proposal for an informational structural realism. I intend to show that ISR is still fundamentally a digital ontology, albeit with some different metaphysical commitments to those that Floridi rejects. I will argue that even though Floridi deploys the method of levels of abstraction adapted from computer science, and has established a Kantian transcendentalist conception of both information and structure, ISR still reduces to a discretised binary, and therefore digital, ontology. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Information, Computation, Cognition. Agency-Based Hierarchies of Levels.Dodig-Crnkovic Gordana - 2016 - In Vincent C. Müller (ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Cham: Springer. pp. 139-159.
    This paper connects information with computation and cognition via concept of agents that appear at variety of levels of organization of physical/chemical/cognitive systems – from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, life-like chemical systems, to cognitive systems starting with living cells, up to organisms and ecologies. In order to obtain this generalized framework, concepts of information, computation and cognition are generalized. In this framework, nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics, where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the (...)
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  • A Revised Attack on Computational Ontology.Nir Fresco & Phillip J. Staines - 2014 - Minds and Machines 24 (1):101-122.
    There has been an ongoing conflict regarding whether reality is fundamentally digital or analogue. Recently, Floridi has argued that this dichotomy is misapplied. For any attempt to analyse noumenal reality independently of any level of abstraction at which the analysis is conducted is mistaken. In the pars destruens of this paper, we argue that Floridi does not establish that it is only levels of abstraction that are analogue or digital, rather than noumenal reality. In the pars construens of this paper, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Neutral monism.Leopold Stubenberg - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Digital Despotism and Aristotle on the Despotic Master–Slave Relation.Ziyaad Bhorat - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (4):1-22.
    This paper analyzes a contemporary conception of digital despotism through themes drawn from classical Greek philosophy. By taking as a measure some of the most radically excluded categories of human existence, Aristotle’s slave and slavish types, I offer a way to understand digital despotism as a syndrome of overlapping risks to human impairment, brought about by the advent of automated data processing technologies, which dispossesses people along i) ontological and ii) cognitive dimensions. This conception aims to balance the appeal to (...)
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  • The Architecture of Mind as a Network of Networks of Natural Computational Processes.Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic - 2015 - Philosophies 1 (1):111--125.
    In discussions regarding models of cognition, the very mention of “computationalism” often incites reactions against the insufficiency of the Turing machine model, its abstractness, determinism, the lack of naturalist foundations, triviality and the absence of clarity. None of those objections, however, concerns models based on natural computation or computing nature, where the model of computation is broader than symbol manipulation or conventional models of computation. Computing nature consists of physical structures that form layered computational architecture, with computation processes ranging from (...)
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  • Emergence and Fundamentality in a Pancomputationalist Universe.Mark Pexton - 2015 - Minds and Machines 25 (4):301-320.
    The aim of this work is to apply information theoretic ideas to the notion of fundamentality. I will argue that if one adopts pancomputationalism as a metaphysics for the universe, then there are higher-level structures which are just as fundamental for computation as anything from microphysics.
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  • The Cybersemiotics and Info-Computationalist Research Programmes.Gordana Dodig Crnkovic - 2010 - Entropy 12 (4):878-901.
    Both Cybersemiotics and Info-computationalist research programmes represent attempts to unify understanding of information, knowledge and communication. The first one takes into account phenomenological aspects of signification which are insisting on the human experience "from within". The second adopts solely the view "from the outside" based on scientific practice, with an observing agent generating inter-subjective knowledge in a research community. The process of knowledge production, embodied into networks of cognizing agents interacting with the environment and developing through evolution is studied on (...)
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  • Measure for Measure: Operationalising Cognitive Realism.Majid D. Beni - 2024 - Minds and Machines 34 (3):1-16.
    This paper develops a measure of realism from within the framework of cognitive structural realism (CSR). It argues that in the context of CSR, realism can be operationalised in terms of balance between accuracy and generality. More specifically, the paper draws on the free energy principle to characterise the measure of realism in terms of the balance between accuracy and generality.
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  • (1 other version)Towards a bioinformational understanding of AI.Rahul D. Gautam & Balaganapathi Devarakonda - 2022 - AI and Society 37:1-23.
    The article seeks to highlight the relation between ontology and communication while considering the role of AI in society and environment. Bioinformationalism is the technical term that foregrounds this relationality. The study reveals instructive consequences for philosophy of technology in general and AI in particular. The first section introduces the bioinformational approach to AI, focusing on three critical features of the current AI debate: ontology of information, property-based vs. relational AI, and ontology vs. constitution of AI. When applied to the (...)
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  • Alan Turing's Legacy: Info-Computational Philosophy of Nature.Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic - 2013 - In Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic Raffaela Giovagnoli (ed.), Computing Nature. pp. 115--123.
    Alan Turing’s pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges’ view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing’s natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo’s view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language used to describe nature as computation produces real time physical behaviors. This article presents the framework of Natural info-computationalism as a contemporary natural philosophy that builds on the legacy of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Towards a bioinformational understanding of AI.Rahul D. Gautam & Balaganapathi Devarakonda - 2024 - AI and Society 39 (2):491-513.
    The article seeks to highlight the relation between ontology and communication while considering the role of AI in society and environment. Bioinformationalism is the technical term that foregrounds this relationality. The study reveals instructive consequences for philosophy of technology in general and AI in particular. The first section introduces the bioinformational approach to AI, focusing on three critical features of the current AI debate: ontology of information, property-based vs. relational AI, and ontology vs. constitution of AI. When applied to the (...)
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  • How realist is informational structural realism?Billy Wheeler - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6).
    Informational structural realism (ISR) offers a new way to understand the nature of the “structure” that structural realists claim our best scientific theories get right about the world. According to Luciano Floridi, who has given the most detailed formulation of ISR so far, this structure is composed of information representing binary differences. In this paper I assess whether ISR offers a good way to resolve the tension between the no miracle argument (often taken to support scientific realism) and the pessimistic (...)
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  • (1 other version)ISR is Still a Digital Ontology.Bruce Long - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (3):649-664.
    I will analyse Floridi’s rejection of digital ontologies and his positive proposal for an informational structural realism. I intend to show that ISR is still fundamentally a digital ontology, albeit with some different metaphysical commitments to those that Floridi rejects. I will argue that even though Floridi deploys the method of levels of abstraction adapted from computer science, and has established a Kantian transcendentalist conception of both information and structure, ISR still reduces to a discretised binary, and therefore digital, ontology. (...)
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  • The Interaction and Convergence of the Philosophy and Science of Information.Kun Wu - 2016 - Philosophies 1 (3):228--244.
    Under the impact of information technology and the information sciences, major changes are occurring in both science and philosophy that constitute an informational turn. The recently developed Philosophy of Information has integrated the unique dualistic ontological properties of information, and scientific rationality can now be seen to include an interactive relationship between science and philosophy. Information, in particular Information Science is thus part of the structure, and not just of the content, of philosophy. In this mode of knowledge development, science (...)
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  • Physical Computation and Cognitive Science, by Nir Fresco: Heidelberg: Springer, 2014, pp. xxii + 229, 99,99€. [REVIEW]Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2):396-399.
    This is review of the book "Physical Computation and Cognitive Science" by Nir Fresco: http://www.springer.com/la/book/9783642413742.
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  • How to cross boundaries in the information society: vulnerability, responsiveness, and accountability.Massimo Durante - 2013 - Acm Sigcas Computers and Society 43 (1):9-21.
    The paper examines how the current evolution and growth of ICTs enables a greater number of individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a larger scale: this phenomenon enables people to cross the conventional boundaries set up across modernity. The presence of diverse barriers does not however disappear, and we therefore still experience cultural, political, legal and moral boundaries in the globalised Information Society. The paper suggests that the issue of boundaries is to be understood, primarily, in philosophical (...)
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  • The Ontological Role of Applied Mathematics in Virtual Worlds.Miklós Hoffmann - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (1):22.
    In this paper, I will argue that with the emergence of digital virtual worlds (in video games, animation movies, etc.) by the animation industry, we need to rethink the role and authority of mathematics, also from an ontological point of view. First I will demonstrate that the application of mathematics to the creation and description of the digital, virtual worlds behaves in many respects analogously to the application of mathematics to the description of real-world phenomena from the viewpoint of the (...)
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