Abstract
In the fourteenth chapter of The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi puts forth a criticism of ‘digital ontology’ as a step toward the articulation of an ‘informational structural realism’. Based on the claims made in the chapter, the present paper seeks to evaluate the distinctly Kantian scope of the chapter from a rather unconventional viewpoint: while in sympathy with the author’s doubts ‘against’ digital philosophy, we follow a different route. We turn our attention to the concept of construction as used in the book with the hope of raising some additional questions that might contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake in Floridi’s experimental epistemological response to digital ontology.
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Notes
For an excellent exegesis of the quality of the Kantian subject as constitutive see Vuillemin (1954).
In the chapter, Floridi refers to a collection of thinkers including Zuse, Steinhart, Wolfram, Fredkin, Schidthumer et al. Although he points out that there are differences in their work, he focuses on their common ground as one of metaphysical monism.
It would make sense here to quote a bit more of what Weinberg has to say on the matter of experimentation and proof:
Wolfram goes on to make a far-reaching conjecture, that almost all automata of any sort that produce complex structures can be emulated by any one of them, so they are all equivalent in Wolfram’s sense, and they are all universal. This doesn’t mean that these automata are computationally equivalent (even in Wolfram’s sense) to systems involving quantities that vary continuously. Only if Wolfram were right that neither space nor time nor anything else is truly continuous (which is a separate issue) would the Turing machine or the rule 110 cellular automaton be computationally equivalent to an analog computer or a quantum computer or a brain or the universe. But even without this far-reaching (and far-out) assumption, Wolfram’s conjecture about the computational equivalence of automata would at least provide a starting point for a theory of any sort of complexity that can be produced by any kind of automaton.
The trouble with Wolfram’s conjecture is not only that it has not been proved—a deeper trouble is that it has not even been stated in a form that could be proved. What does Wolfram mean by complex? If his conjecture is not to be a tautology, then we must have some definition of complex behavior independent of the notion of universality. The pattern produced by the rule 110 cellular automaton certainly looks complex, but what criterion for complexity can we use that would tell us that it is complex enough for Wolfram’s conjecture to apply? (Weinberg 2002).
For a brilliant problematisation of the genesis and power of the concept of ‘state’ see Stengers (2003).
For instance, via the Babylonian method. See Fowler and Robson (1998).
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Sdrolia, C., Bishop, J.M. Rethinking Construction: On Luciano Floridi’s ‘Against Digital Ontology’. Minds & Machines 24, 89–99 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-013-9329-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-013-9329-z