Becoming digital: Reconciling theories of digital representation and embodiment

Abstract

One of the defining characteristics of information in actually-existing computational mechanisms ranging from the World Wide Web to word-processors is that they deal in information that is - or at least seems to be - robustly digital, bits and bytes. Yet shockingly, there is no clear notion of what ‘being’ digital consists of, even though a working notion of digitality is necessary to understand computers, if not human intelligence. This is not to say that ‘digitality’ is not understood in a practical or engineering sense, for assuredly we build digital systems. While engineers can implement digitality, and ordinary people ‘know it when they see it,’ there is no rigorous philosophical definition of digitality. So a whole host of questions are left unanswered when human intuitions over digitality vary, which can easily happen outside of a practical engineering context. For example, are concepts digital? Can non-human artifacts be digital? Is digitality subjective or objective? [22]. These kinds of questions can not be answered rigorously because philosophy has in general ignored inspecting the intuitions behind digitality, so our first task should be to create a philosophical definition of digitality.