"In the beginning was the Word": What if ancient philosophy was actually describing informational reality?

0 points by Glittering_Iron_2657 12 hours ago on reddit | 14 comments

hologram137 | 12 hours ago

I love a free thinker OP, cause even if it’s not exactly right, it might lead to something close to it. It’s possible the ancients were encoding an idea like that.

But this is the wrong sub for your speculations

darkerthanblack666 | 12 hours ago

What is your evidence that information, not spacetime or matter or something else, is the most fundamental thing?

hologram137 | 7 hours ago

Recent physics. Spacetime is emergent. Matter isn’t even fundamental. Quantum fields are. Matter comes from excitations in the quantum field

Information is likely fundamental, or at least more fundamental

darkerthanblack666 | 7 hours ago

Can you point to a recent, peer-reviewed physics article that indicates that information is fundamental?

hologram137 | 7 hours ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3912322/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0303264796883687

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/

https://www.space.com/29477-did-information-create-the-cosmos.html

In the articles you’ll see the sources embedded

darkerthanblack666 | 6 hours ago

The author of the first paper even states themselves that their paper is highly speculative. Even if they hadn't, they make no meaningful or testable predictions.

I couldn't pull the second paper due to some login issues.

The third link is a popsci article. I followed one of the links at the end, and the preprint that I found also offers no testable predictions and doesn't try to reconcile the notion of information being fundamental with observation.

The final link is another highly speculative popsci article with no links to any papers whatsover.

At least the last two links are from more than 10 years ago, which should tell you that this work has barely been touched upon, likely because there isn't much there there.

hologram137 | 6 hours ago

You’re not making any sense. I linked those articles so you could understand it, there is empirical evidence, look at tests of Laundauer’s principle. Look at Shannon information. This is all testable and has been tested.

Quantum mechanics treats states as qubits which are superpositions of information. These are governed by laws. Also look at information encoded on the surface of black holes.

These are concrete frameworks.

https://phys.org/news/2012-03-landauer-dissipated-memory-erased.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10872

This is was published in nature!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-02930-9

https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.090402

https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.240502

Information is a real, known property of the universe. There is a lot of empirical evidence for information being fundamental, and spacetime being emergent.

Matter is just excitations in quantum fields, information is fundamental to quantum mechanics

I didn’t link these papers originally because obviously they’re difficult unless you’re in the field, so I linked articles

darkerthanblack666 | 6 hours ago

Landauer's Principle makes no claims that information is fundamental.

None of these papers in fact make the claim that information is fundamental.

That one can describe different systems using information theory does not mean that those (EDIT) systems are information fundamentally.

hologram137 | 3 hours ago

It’s not going to say that in those words. But that is what it means. This is why I said you need to be able to understand the papers and why I linked the articles instead

darkerthanblack666 | 3 hours ago

I do not see how the thermodynamics of bit flips means that information is fundamental, e.g. underpinning space, time, and matter. These are not at all even close to the same claims. Show why these papers suggest that information is fundamental.

hologram137 | 2 hours ago

Because that’s how quantum mechanics works. And matter comes from quantum fields.

Spacetime isn’t emergent from information, that isn’t what “information is more fundamental” means. But spacetime is emergent, not fundamental

sohcahtoa | 3 hours ago

I don't think information can exist without any means to produce it, to transmit it, to record it or a consume it. So it cannot be the beginning, something else is needed first before there can be something we call information.