Information cosmology (it from bit)
Explanation
The slogan it from bit is John Archibald Wheeler's. On his reading, every physical entity (it) ultimately derives from binary answers (bit) to physical questions: presences or absences, zeros or ones. Information cosmology generalises this idea: information is not just a tool to describe the world, but its fundamental fabric. Matter, energy, space and time would be emergent properties of more basic informational processes.
This view rests on several contemporary developments. The thermodynamics of black holes (Bekenstein, Hawking) links entropy with information. Quantum information theory treats any system as an informational resource. Emergent gravity (Verlinde) suggests that gravitational force comes from changes in entropy. The AdS/CFT correspondence relates gravity and gravity-free fields as equivalent descriptions in informational terms.
For consciousness, this cosmology is a natural ally of informational theories of mind. If information is what is fundamental, there is no ontological abyss between the material and the mental: both are informational patterns with different emergent properties. Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) can be read as a special case: consciousness is integrated information (Φ), arising where the informational structure meets certain requirements.
Other authors (David Chalmers, Henry Stapp, Giulio Tononi in informationalist version) have argued that any fundamental theory aspiring to integrate consciousness must start from something close to information, not from material particles. The idea is that information has both objective aspects (mathematical structures, distinctions, constraints) and subjective aspects (something is information for someone), making it a natural bridging category between physics and experience.
There are more speculative proposals, such as Zeilinger's claim that physical reality is information, or digital cosmologies that see the universe as a cellular automaton. Each has its nuances, but they share the idea that we should shift the conceptual centre: instead of starting from material things that later acquire informational properties, start from information that later acquires dynamic, geometric and, eventually, experiential properties.
The criticisms are methodological and semantic. What does information mean exactly in this context? Information for whom? Is information without substrate coherent? Other physicists prefer to talk of physical processes without needing the metaphysics of primary information. Despite the debate, informational cosmology has changed the conceptual landscape: today it is hard to discuss the foundations of physics without resorting to the language of information, and that has given informational theories of consciousness a friendlier cosmological ground.
Strengths
- Serious physical programme on foundations.
- Compatible with informational theories of consciousness.
- Articulation with deep quantum experiments.
- Inspiration for new formalisms.
Main critiques
- The ontological primacy of information is contested.
- Risk of confusing epistemology with ontology.
- Hardly falsifiable as a general thesis.
- Does not directly address the hard problem.