Abstract
As a science amateur and software professional, I find the digital physics community's fixation on the bit disheartening. To the extent that John Archibald Wheeler's "It from bit" (echoed by Seth Lloyd) or MIT's "Center for Bits and Atoms" represent mere whimsical euphemism for computation as a whole, that is one thing; but I get the impression that a good many of the thought leaders in this area genuinely believe that a computational model of everything is rooted in the bit. I think there are several compelling reasons why those thought leaders should at least consider abandoning this belief. This paper discusses those reasons and then presents an alternative conception of digital physics that I call computational ontology.
Owen Thomas Cunningham