Digital philosophy is a new movement in philosophy advocated by prominent scientists such as Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Gregory Chaitin. It is basically a modern re-interpretation of Leibniz's metaphysics, as it substitutes the monad with digital computation. Digital physics conjectures that the universe is a special type of cellular automata that is Turing-complete.

The digital approach in metaphysics promises to solve the hard problems in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of physics, since the mind can be given a computational treatment following the footsteps of Leibniz, and dispenses with the non-deterministic essentialism of (Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum theory. In a digital universe, existence is equivalent to computation, and so is thought. Thus computation is the single substance of a monist metaphysics, while subjectivity is constructed through universal computation. (This intriguing approach to epistemology has been dubbed Multism, since it posits the existence of multiple universes.)

There is a newsgroup called sci.physics.discrete and two mailing lists, namely digitalphilosophy and digitalphysics, on yahoogroups.com

See also

• digital physics
• multism
• algorithmic information theory

External links

Ed Fredkin's digital philosophy page