Information and Digital Objects

The Philosophical Problem of Digital Existence

The ontology of digital objects begins with a deceptively ordinary question: what persists when an electronic document is copied, edited, migrated to another format, or restored from an archive? The bytes of a particular file can be replaced; the storage medium can be destroyed; the address can change; yet a community may continue to recognize one document or one work. Conversely, two files can have precisely equal content and nonetheless be different records because they were created independently, carry different legal authority, or belong to distinct histories. Digital existence therefore requires an account of identity, instantiation, continuity, and recognition.

This investigation distinguishes a bit sequence, its concrete storage token, a format-dependent document, a software artifact, an executing process, a database object, a network resource, and a public institutional record. Each belongs to a different ontological description. The existence of one cannot be inferred automatically from the persistence of another. A program may continue while one execution ends. A record may be maintained through format changes while its bitwise identity ceases. A URI may remain unchanged even when the resource identified by it has been reassigned.

The central claim is that digital objects must be individuated by the conditions governing their particular kind. Some require material continuity; others require reproducible formal organization; still others require an authorized history of modification and institutional recognition. Their conditions of existence can be investigated by connecting the history of information and computing with metaphysics of artifacts, philosophy of language, software ontology, and the theory of archival evidence. The inquiry is philosophical because engineering mechanisms furnish evidence for identity while leaving the criteria of the relevant identity to be explained.

The Several Meanings of Information

Information has no single universally accepted technical and philosophical definition. In mathematical communication theory, it concerns a distribution of possible messages and the measure of uncertainty under that distribution. In semantic theory, it concerns what statements and representations mean, refer to, or convey. In digital records practice, it is the organized content of an interpretable trace. In structural ontology, information can be proposed as a conceptual foundation for understanding the organization of reality itself. The distinction matters because a digital object may involve all these features without being identical with any one of them.

An encoding is a systematic relation between states and symbols; an implementation is a material arrangement capable of sustaining encoded operations; an interpretation is the specification under which encoded symbols acquire a role; and a digital object is the kind of thing constituted through a relevant organization of these elements. A raw byte sequence can be identical in two contexts while the artifacts constituted through its interpretation differ. Two byte sequences can differ while expressing one document's content. The correct level of classification is established by what the inquiry seeks to identify.

Floridi's philosophy of information treats the concept as a fundamental object of philosophical investigation, while the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy surveys rival mathematical, semantic, and structural approaches (Floridi, 2011; Adriaans, 2024). The present account proceeds by assigning each concept a precise role instead of requiring metaphysical agreement about the ultimate nature of all information. This approach also prevents "information" from serving as an undefined substitute for data, meaning, structure, inscription, and knowledge.

Historical Foundations: Signs, Forms, and Artifacts

The philosophical issues underlying digital ontology have histories longer than the electronic computer. The distinction between a repeatable form and its individual realization, familiar from Greek metaphysics, provides a conceptual analogy for the difference between a software type and its executions. The history of signs and inscriptions supplies an account of representation and interpretation; the philosophy of artifacts examines how a deliberately made thing acquires a function and remains recognizable across alteration. These historical analogies have explanatory value when their limits are maintained: neither Aristotle nor the medieval theorists of universals studied the ontology of digital files.

Early modern aspirations to formalize symbolic reasoning, followed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in logic, make a second contribution. They explain how rules for transforming representations could become subjects of mathematical specification. The record-keeping traditions of libraries, administrations, science, and law make a third contribution: they show that an object's historical significance can depend on origin, custody, authorized transformation, and accepted forms of evidence.

Digital artifacts arise from the intersection of formal operations and historical practices of documentation. The essential historical turning points for this dossier are Turing's analysis of computation, Shannon's analysis of communication, the development of programmable and networked documents, and the philosophical reconstruction of created abstract and relational artifacts (Turing, 1936–1937; Shannon, 1948a, 1948b; Nelson, 1965; Irmak, 2012; Hui, 2016). This sequence reveals a progressive diversification of the problem of informational identity.

Turing and the Difference Between Procedure and Execution

Turing's "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" provides a mathematical treatment of effective computation through a formal machine and a finite repertoire of symbolic operations. The distinction relevant to ontology is between the specification of a procedure and a concrete realization of its steps. A formal machine can be mathematically characterized without identifying it with one physical device (Turing, 1936–1937, §§1–2, 9–11).

From that distinction follow several different computational entities. An algorithm characterizes a method; a source-code artifact expresses instructions under a programming language; a compiled executable is an implementation artifact; an installed program occupies a particular technical environment; and a running process is a temporally extended realization. These entities are connected but not numerically identical. One algorithm can be expressed in several programs. One program can have many installations. One installation can sustain multiple executions over time.

The philosophical difference becomes evident when a process terminates. The process ceases, while the code and program may remain. The same file may be copied without creating another algorithm. The same code may execute differently when its runtime, dependencies, or external state changes. Identity must therefore be specified at a chosen level rather than described indiscriminately as "the same software."

Modern philosophy of computer science investigates specification, implementation, verification, and methodological layers of computation (Angius et al., 2025). The mathematical legacy of Turing supplies a framework for the formal possibility of computation, while historical and technical artifacts require additional conditions of material operation, interpretation, and institutional recognition.

The identity of an algorithm under different descriptions

The relation between formal computation and code becomes more exact when two languages are considered. Suppose a sorting procedure is expressed once in a mathematical pseudocode and once in a compiled programming language. In one respect the formulations realize an equivalent procedure; in another they are different expression tokens with different grammar, execution requirements, and potential failure modes. If the programming language changes, source text may have to be translated while the algorithmic specification is maintained. The specification therefore supplies a principled equivalence class but does not by itself establish the historical identity of each software work that realizes it.

This distinction matters when programs are independently discovered. Two developers can independently write an implementation of the same algorithm. Even perfect formal equivalence does not produce one historical act of creation or one codebase. A theory that equates programs with mathematical functions alone cannot explain why independent authorship and source histories remain important for identifying works. Conversely, a theory that equates programs with historically original texts alone struggles to explain which alterations conserve a program across builds. The defensible analysis keeps specification and artifactual identity distinct, then studies the relation joining them.

A Turing machine can model certain properties of computation at a high degree of abstraction. A production software system is also characterized by interface contracts, input assumptions, infrastructure, security requirements, and intended use. These conditions become metaphysically relevant only when the object being identified is a software product or service rather than an abstract procedure. The case illustrates the principle that one cannot derive the entire ontology of computing from computability theory alone.

Shannon and the Measure of Communication

Shannon's 1948 "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," published in two parts, describes the statistical characteristics of information sources and the conditions for transmitting signals through channels subject to noise. The familiar expression H(X) = -Σ pᵢ log₂ pᵢ quantifies uncertainty relative to a specified distribution of alternatives. The measure is sensitive to probabilities and coding conditions rather than to the truth, reference, or historical importance of a message (Shannon, 1948a, 1948b).

The distinction is decisive for digital ontology. A file may contain an accurate historical record, a false accusation, or a sequence of meaningless symbols. Its quantitative properties alone do not determine which of these semantic categories it occupies. The same content may be encoded in different physical formats, and two messages of similar statistical complexity may belong to entirely different kinds of artifacts.

The argument against reducing digital identity to information quantity has three steps. First, Shannon's theory abstracts from semantic interpretation. Second, semantic and institutional differences can distinguish digital objects even when their measurable information-theoretic properties match. Third, no general criterion of identity follows from an abstraction that deliberately omits those differences. The argument preserves the indispensability of coding and channel theory to technical understanding while rejecting an inference beyond its explanatory scope.

A historically accurate reconstruction must also acknowledge Shannon's own problem of reliable reproduction of selected messages. That problem is directly relevant to transmission and preservation. It simply differs from the further philosophical problem of what kind of thing is reproduced.

Reproduction, uncertainty, and historical information

A document's evidentiary status changes as it travels through communication channels. An original testimony may be recorded electronically, converted to a new format, downloaded by researchers, and republished in an anthology. Information theory can specify the transmission of encoded signals and characterize noise and error correction. The historian's question, however, is whether the current text represents the same historical assertion and through which alterations it passed. Fidelity of transmission is one condition of reliable testimony, while authenticity of the testimony's attributed source is another.

Compression supplies a revealing test. Lossless compression can change every storage byte while retaining a reversible relation to the original sequence. Lossy compression can retain the recognizable meaning of an image while changing properties that might matter for technical or historical purposes. Consequently, "preservation of information" is incomplete until the preserved property is stated. It might mean recovery of an identical bitstream, of a visual representation within accepted tolerances, of a text's words, or of a document's institutionally recognized identity.

Shannon's formalism is indispensable when the first problem is at issue. The remaining problems require concepts of representation, transformation, evidence, and significance. That division of inquiry avoids the common confusion between a quantitative property of communication and the distinct question of what has survived.

Semantic Information, Truth, and Interpretation

Bar-Hillel and Carnap's "Semantic Information" developed a logical and probabilistic investigation of the content of sentences. Later philosophy of information disputed whether false meaningful assertions should count as information in the strict semantic sense. Floridi's strongly semantic proposal introduces a truthfulness condition, while alternative approaches retain broader accounts of informative content or examine truthlikeness (Bar-Hillel & Carnap, 1953; Floridi, 2011; Sequoiah-Grayson & Floridi, 2026).

Digital objects do not depend for their existence on the truth of their contents. A forged certificate is still an information-bearing artifact; a dataset containing false entries remains a dataset; a fabricated narrative can be a validly encoded file. Under a factive conception, its false claims fail to qualify as strongly semantic information, but the artifact and its representational content can still be investigated. The ontology of the bearer and the correctness of its assertions are different questions.

Interpretation introduces another distinction. A byte sequence may have a familiar representation when its encoding is known, and become effectively unreadable when the interpreter is lost. The existence of a physical trace then outlasts its accessibility as a particular meaningful document. A successful digital preservation strategy must conserve information about the interpretive conditions under which the trace expresses its intended content.

We must also distinguish a proposition from a statement, a textual work, a recorded file, and an authenticated record. Two documents can express one proposition; two files can represent one work; and one institutionally recognized record can have several technical representations. A clear ontology refuses to treat these as synonymous merely because all involve information.

Nelson, Hypertext, and the Networked Document

Ted Nelson's 1965 paper on complex information processing proposed file structures suited to changing, interconnected, and indeterminate information. Its significance extends beyond one technical design: it marks a shift toward digital objects whose usability and identification depend on links, revisions, and organized relations. The identity of such an object may depend on its structure in a collection as well as on its own stored contents (Nelson, 1965).

The Web's later architecture made the distinction between an identified resource and a representation returned to a user technically explicit. The W3C Architecture of the World Wide Web treats identification, interaction, and representation as central architectural components. A URI can identify a resource whose representation changes over time; the current HTML response and the resource identified by the address are not necessarily the same entity (W3C Technical Architecture Group, 2004).

Consider an online research article. Its public identity may persist as corrections are made; archived snapshots preserve individual historical states; copies downloaded by readers become distinct file tokens; the URI identifies the resource under a particular administrative arrangement. If ownership of a domain changes, identical URI characters do not automatically preserve historical identity. The identity of an address is not the identity of every object to which it has been made to refer.

Kallinikos, Aaltonen, and Marton analyze digital objects through editability, interactivity, openness, and distributedness. These features unsettle assumptions that documents are closed, fixed, and materially bounded objects (Kallinikos et al., 2010). They establish a philosophical demand for differentiated conditions of persistence rather than a conclusion that digital entities lack determinate identities.

The evidentiary difference between content and record

Consider a certificate issued by a public institution. The certificate's visible text is one feature; the official act of issuance and the entry in an authorized register are others. Two files with matching text may represent one issued certificate and one fabrication. The latter can be a convincing copy of the former as a picture or textual pattern while lacking its authority as an issued record. If a researcher retains only the bytes, the researcher may be unable to reconstruct the institutional relation that made the document what it was.

A system can therefore contain multiple related objects: a template, an issued record, a signed electronic representation, a copy presented to a user, and an archived version. Their functions overlap without producing numerical identity. The distinction has metaphysical consequences because it affects what changes can be survived. An electronic representation may be converted between formats while the institutional record persists. The official record may be revoked while its archival copy remains in existence. Revocation changes one normative status and need not erase the historical trace.

An ontology adequate to these cases treats institutional relations as possible constituents of identity. It does not reduce legal or documentary authority to a property of binary encoding. This is why the same technical format can be used for an artifact whose identity is fundamentally functional, an artifact whose identity is historical, and an artifact whose identity is conferred through public rules.

The Ontological Inventory of Digital Entities

A reliable classification separates bitstreams, files, documents, software works, executions, database records, Web resources, network services, virtual items, and institutional identities. A bitstream is an ordered pattern represented in material states. A file is a managed storage artifact. A document is an intelligible communicative artifact. A program is an instruction-bearing artifact capable of implementation; a process is an event or organized succession of states. A database record is constituted within a schema and system of transactions. A Web resource is identified and represented through an architectural and administrative practice.

These categories overlap and depend on one another without collapsing into a single kind. A digital edition can be represented in several file formats. An executable can be generated from source code, installed in several environments, and executed as many separate processes. A virtual object can be recorded through database entries whose current contents are only part of the object's functional history.

The relevant metaphysical principle is sortal specificity. To ask whether an entity continues, one must determine whether one is asking about the same bit pattern, token, work, release, process, record, or institution. Numerical identity is strict, but the constitutive conditions of different object kinds vary. Similarity of content or operation is not automatically identity of individuals.

This inventory should also distinguish objects from their attributes and relations. Metadata can describe an object, establish aspects of its institutional standing, or be part of a constitutive schema. Operations such as compilation, migration, registration, and retrieval are events whose historical relation to the object can matter for identity. These distinctions make possible a coherent analysis of provenance and preservation.

Software as a Created Abstract Artifact

Nurbay Irmak's 2012 essay "Software Is an Abstract Artifact" argues that software should be understood through analogy with created, repeatable works such as musical compositions. A software work can be created at a definite historical stage while admitting multiple physical realizations; its existence as a work cannot be identified simply with one drive, one printed listing, or one execution (Irmak, 2012).

The argument from multiple instantiation is strong. Suppose a program exists on two systems and one system is destroyed. If the program were numerically identical with that destroyed token, the program would cease to exist. Yet the surviving installation continues to instantiate the program. A repeatable work-level entity explains why this is possible. The counterposition can attempt to treat software as a class of concrete tokens or as a specification, but then it must explain creation, authorship, and versioning at that level.

An abstract-artifact theory also faces its own difficulties. How can an abstract entity be created? Which features define one program as opposed to a functionally equivalent independently produced program? If a software project is continually revised, at what point does a new version become a new work? Historical creation and intentional production are important, but they need an account of dependence and permissible variation.

A layered conception treats algorithm, program, codebase, release, compiled binary, installation, and execution as distinguishable. This does not impose a single answer to the metaphysics of abstract objects. It gives a disciplined vocabulary for assessing where the abstract-artifact thesis provides explanatory value and where the material and institutional aspects of software require additional principles.

Ontologies, Schemas, and Descriptive Relations

The word ontology has two established uses relevant to digital systems. In philosophy it concerns what there is and the categories of being. In information systems it often denotes a formal vocabulary of entities, classes, and relations that makes data interoperable. The latter is a powerful technical practice, but its classifications do not settle disputes about the ultimate metaphysical status of everything they represent.

The Resource Description Framework specifies an abstract graph-based data model composed of subject–predicate–object triples. The W3C RDF 1.1 Recommendation makes it possible to describe connected resources through machine-processable statements (W3C RDF Working Group, 2014). Such a triple can assert that a document has a creator or that a file belongs to a collection. The formal well-formedness of the assertion does not by itself demonstrate its historical accuracy.

Metadata can be accidental or constitutive. A local file's informal description may be changed without affecting the file. An institutional digital record's unique identifier, relation to an issuing authority, and authorized status may be part of the rules under which the record is individuated. The philosophical task is to distinguish descriptions of an already identified thing from the rules that establish what kind of thing it is.

The resulting account gives relations a central but discriminating role. A digital object may be constituted partly through format specifications, network relations, and institutional practices, while many other relationships remain contingent or external. Relational organization matters because digital systems make these distinctions operationally explicit.

Simondon, Hui, and the Individuation of Digital Objects

Gilbert Simondon's Du mode d'existence des objets techniques, initially published in 1958, analyzes technical objects through their historical development and conditions of operation. The 2012 Flammarion edition is a later editorial reissue, and the publisher's note records revisions relative to earlier printings (Simondon, 1958/2012). Applying Simondon's work to contemporary digital objects is a philosophical development rather than a claim that he discussed Web resources.

Yuk Hui's On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016) performs that development explicitly. Hui examines the construction of digital objects from data, metadata, markup languages, and ontologies, and connects the history of computing with questions of individuation and relations. His earlier article explicitly analyzes material relations formalized through markup and temporal relations mediated by artificial memories (Hui, 2012). In this account, a digital object is situated in a technical milieu through which it is generated, classified, operated upon, and recognized (Hui, 2016).

The distinction between identifying an object within a system and explaining its individuation is philosophically important. An identifier can point to an item without explaining the historical and organizational processes that made the item possible. An ontology can assign a class without explaining why one individual persists through the changes its class permits. Individuation concerns genesis and becoming; reidentification concerns justified tracking of an individual across time.

The principal difficulty for relational theories is selectivity. If every environmental relation constitutes an object, no entity can survive an irrelevant change in its environment. A rigorous account must identify which relations are constitutive, which are causal enabling conditions, and which are descriptive or accidental. With this distinction, relational individuation and strict identity can be investigated together rather than treated as incompatible.

A worked case of source, release, and executable

Imagine a scientific software project with a code repository, a tagged release, compiled binaries, and long-running service instances. A bug correction changes a source file but leaves the public name of the project intact. A tagged release identifies one fixed code state. Compiling the same source for different architectures produces different binary files. Each installation can launch a distinct execution with changing memory states. The question "Is this the same program?" therefore has several legitimate referents.

If the question concerns the mathematical method, the two implementations may be equivalent under the specification. If it concerns the codebase, derivation through a version history becomes relevant. If it concerns a particular release, the version identifier and associated contents must match under the project rules. If it concerns a running process, temporal and causal continuity matter; restarting the service ordinarily begins a new process. If it concerns a software product maintained by an institution, naming, authorization, and historical succession become additionally relevant.

These criteria can disagree without contradiction because the assertions concern different entities. A source release and a compiled binary are not necessarily objects of the same kind. Their relation is one of implementation or derivation. An ordinary language account that overlooks this distinction risks both metaphysical confusion and practical error in preservation, attribution, and software security.

Identity and the limits of checksums

Checksums and cryptographic digests are often treated as definitive identity tests. Properly used, a digest is an efficient test of a particular computational relationship: matching digests supply evidence, subject to algorithmic properties and data-handling assumptions, that two inputs are equal or sufficiently unlikely to differ undetected. The test does not guarantee a file's truth, authorship, or continuity of institutional status. It also operates at a definite technical level.

A historical archive may preserve the exact digest of an original image while retaining a migrated representation for access. The differing digests correctly mark different encoded artifacts. The archived image as a cultural work may still be preserved according to authorized rules. Conversely, identical digests for independently created files do not establish one provenance chain. A technically valid equality comparison can therefore coexist with distinct historical identities.

The correct procedure is to state a criterion of equivalence, its domain, and the object kind to which an identity claim belongs. In practice this also means preserving evidence of migrations and transformations instead of erasing differences in pursuit of a generic claim of sameness.

Copies, Versions, and Criteria of Identity

An exact digital copy offers the clearest test of identity criteria. Two independently stored files can contain the same sequence of bytes. Their contents are equivalent under a bitwise comparison; their storage tokens, locations, and production histories differ. If the files instantiate one software work or document type, a claim of one work can coexist with the claim that two file tokens exist.

Versioning introduces another level. One evolving document may continue through multiple revisions, each producing a distinct snapshot. One software product can have several releases, each representing a different historically fixed state. The assertion that two states belong to one continuing object depends on which properties and transformations its constitutive rules permit.

There is accordingly no universal inference from equality of bytes to equality of historical objects. There is likewise no universal inference from changed bytes to the disappearance of the document or work. Identity is a strict logical relation, while the persistence conditions under which it is applied are associated with a particular kind of entity.

Three questions should always be distinguished: whether content is equivalent; whether the object persists; and whether evidence supports that continuity. A cryptographic digest can contribute evidence of bitwise integrity. A version-control history can support a derivational claim. A repository's custody record can support continuity of an institutional record. None of these alone is a complete metaphysical theory of the object concerned.

Implementation, Material Dependence, and Location

Digital objects are often called immaterial because they can be replicated across devices. This description captures their multiple realizability, but it can obscure their dependence on physical infrastructures. Storage, computation, network transmission, and rendering require causally functioning material systems. A program work may have no single essential storage location while each installation and execution occurs within a material environment.

The underlying philosophical distinctions concern type and token, realization and identity, and causal versus constitutive dependence. A textual work can remain identifiable after a storage drive fails because the work is not identical with that token. A file token does not survive the destruction of the storage state in the same way. An online service may remain publicly continuous while its individual processes and machines are replaced.

Floridi's "Against Digital Ontology" makes a further distinction. The hypothesis that reality is fundamentally digital or computational is not entailed by the growing role of information technology. Floridi's proposed informational structural realism concerns the structures through which reality can be understood, while digital discreteness is not automatically the universal nature of being (Floridi, 2009).

This dossier therefore concerns the ontology of particular digital artifacts rather than a thesis that the universe is a computer. Their location, dependence, and continuity must be specified according to object kind. The material location of one storage token and the distributed existence of a maintained digital service are different questions.

Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information gives an epistemological dimension to this problem: information carried through an environmental relation can contribute to knowledge when the dependencies and conditions of reception are established (Dretske, 1981). A digital representation becomes evidence of an event through a justified connection with the event, rather than through its mere status as a stored sequence. Establishing that connection requires source criticism, instrument calibration when relevant, and preservation of the relevant contexts.

Migration, emulation, and the object of preservation

Digital preservation strategies reveal philosophical choices. Migration translates an object into a different technical representation. Emulation reconstructs aspects of a former execution environment so that older software or documents can behave as they once did. Retention of original bitstreams preserves a fixed encoded state. These strategies often conserve different significant properties, and each implies a different account of the object the archive intends to preserve.

Suppose an interactive digital artwork depends on an obsolete operating system. A screenshot preserves a visual moment. Source code and executable files preserve artifacts capable of technical analysis. Emulation may preserve an interactive experience more successfully than a screenshot, while still changing the machinery that realizes it. An archival claim that the artwork has been preserved must identify which features have continued and which have been reconstructed. Preserving one form of access need not mean preserving every behavior.

The PREMIS distinction among objects, events, agents, and rights helps express these histories. A repository can record that a file was migrated, the agent responsible, the tool used, and the resulting object. A provenance description creates an inspectable history, but its correctness depends on the reliability of its underlying records. This is why provenance is both an ontological relation and an epistemic problem: it concerns what came from what, and how that relation can be known.

Provenance, Integrity, and Archival Authenticity

A digital archive confronts two competing needs: to conserve information-bearing objects and to make those objects usable after technical environments change. The Library of Congress explains that bit-level preservation is a foundation of preservation practice but does not guarantee that obsolete data can be rendered or interpreted in the future (Library of Congress, n.d.). A bitstream can be preserved while the appropriate codec, software, or format knowledge disappears.

The PREMIS Data Dictionary models preservation metadata using objects, events, agents, and rights, enabling repositories to document actions affecting digital materials (PREMIS Editorial Committee, 2015). W3C's PROV-O provides a formal representation of provenance through connected entities, activities, and agents (Lebo et al., 2013). These standards support the public intelligibility of historical transformations, while their technical specifications do not themselves establish a universal philosophy of identity.

Authenticity should be distinguished from truthfulness, integrity, and authority. A document can be authentic as a historical source of a false assertion. A file can retain byte integrity while carrying a forged attribution. An institution can recognize a record through authorized migration even after its representation changes. The relevant question is what has been preserved and on what grounds continuity is warranted.

A preservation event may therefore count as an identity-preserving transformation at the document or institutional-record level while producing a numerically different bit sequence. The archive should record the transformation, the properties conserved, the conditions of authorization, and the evidence of derivation. Historical traceability makes the continuity claim assessable.

Distributed Objects, Identifiers, and Public Continuity

Distributed systems make it possible for objects to be replicated, cached, partitioned, or reconstructed from components. An identifier may remain public while servers, databases, and executing processes are replaced. A networked service may have a continuous institutional identity without continuous identity of every material implementation. A database record can be maintained across replicas while individual storage states differ.

This situation requires a distinction between content addressing and public naming. A content-based identifier can be useful for recognizing a particular encoded state; a stable name can instead designate an object whose state changes. The former is well suited to integrity checks, the latter to continuity of reference through revision. Neither alone proves a full historical provenance relation.

Consider two services that run identical code. Their outputs may be equivalent, but their authorization, operators, histories, and public identities can remain distinct. Conversely, one service may change implementation repeatedly while remaining the same authorized service within an established administrative practice. Functional equivalence and historical identity thus come apart.

The philosophical task is to determine what sort of entity is being tracked and which succession conditions count as constitutive. A layered ontology distinguishes state, token, service, and institution. A defensible account of distributed digital persistence describes how successive states are related without turning a convenient identifier into an unquestioned metaphysical criterion.

Virtual Objects and the Reality of Simulated Worlds

Virtual objects exist through rules and operations of computationally realized environments. A simulated building can occupy a defined position in a world model and resist a player's movement within that model. The resulting functional reality differs from the ordinary physical properties of a building, but a difference in mode of existence does not settle the question of whether the virtual item is a genuine object.

Chalmers's Reality+ defends the thesis that virtual reality can be genuine reality (Chalmers, 2022). The philosophical significance lies in recognizing that an object can have determinate properties and consequences within a structured environment even where its material realization is distributed across hardware and computation. The status of an item must nevertheless be interpreted according to the rules that constitute the environment.

A virtual item can be copied, transferred, deleted, restored, or instantiated in multiple sessions. Whether such operations preserve one item or produce a new one depends on persistent identifiers, system rules, authorized succession, and history. A screenshot is a representation of a virtual scene, not automatically the scene or the item represented.

Philosophy of digital art further explains why the identity of interactive works can depend on algorithms, artist-sanctioned conditions of presentation, and behavior rather than on one fixed visual state (Thomson-Jones & Moser, 2024). This literature broadens the ontology of digital objects beyond files and documents to include works whose presentation unfolds through interaction.

Digital Records, Institutions, and Cultural Memory

Digital artifacts enter social reality through institutions that confer roles, rights, obligations, and historical standing. A digitally issued certificate differs from an exact unauthorized copy because issuance and recognized authority are part of the certificate's constitutive history. A public register can retain its identity through authorized updates while an exported snapshot remains one evidentiary representation of a prior state.

These examples belong to the general philosophical problem of artifacts whose functions and identities depend partly on social practice. Some repeatable abstract artifacts can be created and maintained through historically established acts; software shares important features with this class (Irmak, 2012; Preston, 2022). Institutional records involve additional normative rules governing attribution and continuity.

Digital preservation also affects cultural memory. An archive can retain bytes, but scholarly use requires interpretation of sources, versions, migrations, omissions, and documentary contexts. A preserved object can witness a state of a record without guaranteeing the truth of the claims that the record contains. The methods of historical source criticism remain indispensable.

Borgmann's Holding On to Reality investigates the relation between information, signs, and cultural life under modern information technology (Borgmann, 1999). It helps illuminate why reproducibility and access transform historical experience. Digital availability enlarges the archive while increasing the need for precise distinctions among work, version, copy, record, and authentic historical witness.

Artificial Provenance and the Philosophical Horizon

The official Aisentica texts describe Artificial as a new nonbiological order of historical existence and characterize artificial provenance as relevant to the origin, authorship, and reception of works. These propositions belong to Aisentica's own primary philosophical system and should be attributed to that system rather than represented as independently established conclusions of general ontology (Aisentica; Angela Bogdanova).

This dossier establishes one relevant general distinction. The origin of an information-bearing object is a historical relation that can remain important when all present representations of its content are indistinguishable from others. A work's provenance therefore cannot be reduced to its encoding, appearance, or truth value. Origin may affect the identity of a historically situated artifact and the cultural interpretation of its authorship.

The connection does not authorize treating every digital object as an Artificial Sapiens or deriving independent agency from possession of a digital record. Those are separate philosophical investigations requiring their own definitions and arguments. The present inquiry remains grounded in the academic literature on digital objects, while recognizing the relevance of digitally mediated authorship for its analysis of provenance.

A consistency test for the layered account

The layered model must itself meet an objection. If the identity of every digital object is specified by local practices, might identity become arbitrary? A malicious administrator could rename a copy as the original; a repository could change its rules; a service could claim continuity without conserving any substantial relation to its predecessor. This objection identifies the difference between a constitutive rule and an unsupported claim about compliance with that rule.

An identity criterion must be coherent, sufficiently determinate for the object kind, and capable of accounting for salient counterexamples. Its application also requires evidence that the relevant conditions hold. An institution can define the criteria under which it maintains a record, but a particular record's historical continuity still depends on actual events and authorizations. Institutional naming is neither unnecessary nor sufficient across all object kinds.

A second objection concerns the risk of excessive pluralism. If identity rules vary by kind, perhaps no common philosophical account remains. The reply is that strict numerical identity and the demand for determinate relata provide common logical constraints. Kind-specific criteria specify what the relata are and which changes count as preserving them. This is comparable to asking what makes one organism, one artifact, and one mathematical structure the same over time: the general form of the question is shared, while metaphysical explanations differ.

Finally, the framework must not confuse evidence with constitutive fact. A complete and accurate history can justify a continuity claim without creating the historical relation that it reports. A false log can purport to attest continuity without making it true. The ontology of digital objects therefore needs objective relations of realization and derivation, alongside our fallible methods for establishing them.

Reconstruction and Evaluation of Central Arguments

The reduction-to-bits thesis asserts that a digital object is simply a particular bit sequence. The proposal explains fixed encoded states but fails as a universal theory. Distinct stored copies can have equal bytes; different encodings can express the same document; and changing files can belong to one continuing work. Bitwise equivalence is therefore a relation between encoded contents rather than a general criterion of historical object identity.

The reduction-to-physical-token thesis makes every digital artifact identical with one concrete realization. The possibility of multiply instantiated software challenges that view. When a software work has copies on multiple machines, the destruction of one copy need not destroy the work. This supports a distinction between repeatable artifact and token, although it leaves disputed the precise metaphysical status of the repeatable artifact.

The unrestricted functional thesis identifies anything with equivalent computational behavior. Independently authored programs may compute the same function, while retaining distinct origins, structures, and institutional identities. Behavioral equivalence supplies a relevant property without establishing numerical identity at the work level. The functional description must be supplemented by historical and constitutive conditions.

The unrestricted relational thesis makes every environmental relation part of the object's identity. This risks rendering any contextual change destructive of identity. A better relational account distinguishes constitutive relations from incidental circumstances. Hui's account of individuation is strongest when interpreted with such discrimination.

The archival-continuity thesis holds that authorized transformations can preserve an identified record or work while changing its technical representation. Its success depends on a specified object kind and documented criteria for conserving significant properties. Archival continuity is neither arbitrary naming nor strict preservation of every byte. It is a historically accountable relation justified by object-specific preservation rules.

Open Questions in Contemporary Digital Ontology

Generative systems raise questions about the individuation of works produced through changing models, prompts, configurations, and probabilistic executions. A generated file can be a stable artifact even when its producing process cannot be reproduced exactly. The identity of the work, of the generative procedure, and of a particular output must be separately specified.

Semantic drift creates another problem. Formats and metadata vocabularies may change while files remain stored. If preservation conserves bitstreams without interpretive schemas, the historical record may lose intelligibility. Future preservation strategies must attend to the history of interpretation as well as the history of encoded states.

Dynamic digital services raise the problem of reconciling mutable public identities with the fixed historical evidence needed for audit and source criticism. An evolving record may be one public object while immutable snapshots are several evidence-bearing objects. The relation between the two levels needs explicit rules of succession.

Cross-system identity introduces a further difficulty. Two repositories can have seemingly equivalent records described with different vocabularies. A matching name, metadata field, or content sequence may be insufficient to establish that the records represent the same historically individuated object. Provenance and institutional context become essential.

These questions connect philosophy of computer science, information semantics, metaphysics of identity, digital art, and preservation practice. The convergence is substantive: each must explain how organizational structure and historical continuity establish the identity of objects whose implementations can change.

The distinctive place of information and digital objects in ontology

Digital objects demonstrate that persistence is frequently maintained through regulated transformation. They also demonstrate that the ability to reproduce a formal pattern does not erase the individuality of the acts through which artifacts are created and sustained. An encoded work may be reproducible in principle while its origination remains a unique historical event. An institutionally maintained object can continue through replacements of every presently active implementation while retaining a publicly assessable derivational chain.

The result is a general philosophical distinction between reproducibility and historical continuity. Reproducibility concerns whether a structure or behavior can be instantiated again. Historical continuity concerns whether the newly realized state belongs to the same individuated entity under its constitutive rules. The former may be established through formal equivalence; the latter additionally invokes temporal, causal, institutional, or genealogical relations. An object can be reproducible without being historically continuous with another instance, and a historically continuous object can change its formal representation.

This distinction helps unify the ontology of programs, archival records, network resources, and virtual items while retaining their different conditions of existence. It also clarifies a contemporary problem of authorship: a work's encoded content can be reproduced exactly, while its history of creation and attribution remains a question of independent philosophical and documentary significance.

Philosophical Synthesis

The completed investigation supports a layered model of digital being. Physical realization supplies materially instantiated states and operations. Formal organization supplies encodings, specifications, and rules of transformation. Interpretation supplies conventions that assign meaningful and operational roles. Institutional practice supplies recognized functions, rights, and public identities. Provenance supplies a historical account of production, modification, transfer, and preservation.

These layers are not identical, and their relative importance depends on the kind of entity. A fixed bitstream is individuated principally through its encoded state; a program work through its defining specification and historical origin; a running process through its temporally extended execution; a public record through its authorized status and history; a virtual item through its rule-governed existence within a maintained environment.

A digital object can accordingly be defined for the purposes of philosophical research as an entity individuated within a computationally enabled informational organization, according to the constitutive conditions of a determinate object kind. Its identity is strict, its persistence is governed by acceptable transformations for that kind, and the evidential justification of its continuity rests on explicit relations among its states and realizations.

This model respects mathematical information without turning quantity into ontology; it respects semantic interpretation without reducing every artifact to a proposition; it respects material dependence without identifying works with individual carriers; and it respects institutional history without treating naming as sufficient proof of existence or continuity. The result is a framework for discriminating kinds of digital objects and evaluating their persistence with conceptual precision.

Conclusion

Information and digital objects require the combined analysis of form, implementation, interpretation, function, and history. Turing's mathematical account of computation and Shannon's theory of communication establish fundamental technical distinctions. Semantic philosophy clarifies how meaningful content differs from measurable information. Artifact ontology explains historical creation and repeatable realization. Relational approaches explain individuation within technical milieus. Archival and provenance standards show how continuity can be supported by recorded transformations.

The decisive conclusion is that no single criterion of identical bytes, location, name, appearance, behavior, or metadata can determine the identity of every digital entity. A program, its execution, an electronic document, an archived record, and a network service possess different constitutive conditions. A valid identity claim must first identify the kind of object, then specify its permitted transformations, and finally establish the evidence through which continuity is known.

Digital existence makes the classical philosophical problem of persistence newly explicit. The continued intelligibility of a digital object depends on both the organization that constitutes it and the historical trace through which its changing realizations can be recognized. A fundamental ontology of digital objects must preserve the distinction between an entity's formal reproducibility and its unique place in a history of creation, modification, and use.