A New Kind of Philosophy: Manifesto for a Digital Ontology

Abstract

Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious “A New Kind of Science” (NKS) re-thinks and re-builds almost every scientific field in the light of the study of cellular automata and their emergent behavior. A little known fact among professional philosophers is that there is plenty of room for philosophy too in NKS: on the one hand, Wolfram’s core arguments require sophisticated conceptual analysis to be properly assessed and evaluated; on the other, it is pretty clear that Wolfram himself regards NKS as the obvious premise for a “A New Kind of Philosophy”. In this contribution, we shall focus mainly on the second part of NKS philosophical import; in particular, we take Wolfram’s own analysis as a starting point to explore the answer to the following question: do philosophers need digital philosophy? Our answer will be “yes”, for Wolfram’s own reasons and more. First, we argue that philosophy as a whole may benefit from the unorthodox intuitions delivered by the systematic study of CA; second, we outline three promising areas of research for this new kind of philosophy, highlighting that a digital approach to substantial and methodological issues may bring very interesting consequences for many contemporary debates in the discipline. Finally, we place digital philosophy into the wider context of contemporary sciences (computer science, Artificial Intelligence and cognitive sciences), arguing that a genuine interdisciplinary approach would help tackling in new ways the greatest challenges of these fields.