Digital philosophy grows out of a previous digital physics, which proposes to ground a great deal of material theory in cellular automata. Specifically, digital physics works through the cost of assuming that the creation is a gigantic Turing-complete cellular automaton.

Digital philosophy is a new re-interpretation of Gottfried Leibniz's monist metaphysics, one that replaces Leibniz's monads with aspects of the premise of cellular automata. The digital approach also dispenses with the non-deterministic essentialism of the Copenhagen explanation of quantum theory. In a digital universe, existence and thought would be equivalent to computation. Thus calculation is the single substance of monist metaphysics, while subjectivity arises from computational universality. This approach to metaphysics has been dubbed multism since it posits the existence of several universes