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ISR is Still a Digital Ontology

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Abstract

I will analyse Floridi’s rejection of digital ontologies and his positive proposal for an informational structural realism (ISR). 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. The digital ontologies that Floridi rejects are John Wheeler’s “It from Bit” conception and computational (including pancomputational) metaphysics (although there are others). They’re rejected predominantly on the basis that they rely upon a false dichotomy between digital discrete and continuous metaphysics (with which I agree). ISR involves a Kantian transcendentalist conception of de re relations that is intended to avoid this false dichotomy. However, I’ll argue that the binary, discrete, digital component of digital ontology is retained in ISR, and therefore ISR is still a digital ontology since its conception of information reduces to binary discrete de re relations. As such, ISR comes down on one side of the rejected ontic dichotomy of digital metaphysics, and so an informational metaphysics that is not a digital ontology is still a promissory note in the philosophy of information.

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Notes

  1. In engineering, and especially software engineering and computer architecture, black box abstraction involves reducing the representation of a complex subsystem to a ‘black box’ with only inputs and outputs to simplify the design process of the rest of the system connected to it, or which incorporates it.

  2. Thanks to a reviewer for this.

  3. I am not the first to do so. See Barbour (2015) and Adriaans (2010).

  4. Binary here simply means two part: there is no lexical or symbolic encoding of values (0 and 1) or else labelling such ‘true’ and ‘false’.

  5. See also (Zenil 2013, 3–5; Vedral 2010; Brooks 2012a, b; Beavers and Harrison 2012, 349–351; Chaitin 2012, 280–281; Hutter 2012, 408–412).

  6. Inconsequentially, he uses angelic Biblical characters to illustrate his argument.

  7. There are various conceptions of the nature of propositions and propositional content, some of which are themselves informational.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Bruce Long

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Camperdown, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Bruce Long

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Long, B. ISR is Still a Digital Ontology. Erkenn 85, 649–664 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0041-5

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