Digital Philosophy

Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables.

http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/

written by Ed Fredkin.

What is the Soul? http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/on_the_soul.htm

Digital philosophy is a direction in philosophy and cosmology advocated by certain mathematicians and theoretical physicists, e.g., Gregory Chaitin, Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Konrad Zuse (see his Calculating Space). Digital philosophy grew out of an earlier digital physics (both terms are due to Fredkin), which proposes to ground much of physical theory in Cellular Automata. Specifically, digital physics works through the consequences of assuming that the universe is a gigantic Turing-complete cellular automaton.

Digital philosophy is a modern re-interpretation of Gottfried Leibniz's monist metaphysics, one that replaces Leibniz's monads with aspects of the theory of cellular automata. Digital philosophy purports to solve certain hard problems in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of physics, since, following Leibniz, the mind can be given a computational treatment. The digital approach also dispenses with the non-deterministic essentialism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. In a digital universe, existence and thought would consist of only computation. (However, not all computation would be thought.) Thus computation is the single substance of a monist metaphysics, while subjectivity arises from computational universality. There are many variants of digital philosophy, but most of them are digital theories that view all of physical reality and mental activity as digitized information processing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_philosophy

Simulated Reality is the skeptical hypothesis that Reality could be simulated—perhaps by computer Simulation—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not be fully aware that they are living inside a simulation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

Oct'2011: Now a team of researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany led by Silas Beane say they have evidence this may be true... Just being a Simulation, the computer would put limits on, for instance, the energy that particles can have within the program. These limits would be experienced by those living within the sim - and as it turns out, something which looks just like these limits do in fact exist.

cf 2003-11-21-BrinStonesOfSignificance