Computational systems have been generating emergent structures for decades, yet no stable experimental discipline exists to study them as phenomena in their own right. This essay applies Ian Hacking’s interventionist account to computational systems, showing that they can support the same operational conditions through which phenomenological standing is acquired in other domains. A layered methodology is proposed for the study of such virtual phenomena, consisting of substrate, apparatus, data, information, and knowledge. Each layer conditions the next while remaining independently valuable. The methodology recovers a pre-theoretic mode of inquiry that proved foundational in the history of science and applies it to a domain where it has been prematurely foreclosed. Theory, if it arrives, does so as a consequence of sustained practice rather than as its prerequisite.
Lior Ben-Gai (Tue,) studied this question.