Information, Consciousness
and the Connected Universe
A Systematic Philosophy
Draft for Review and Publication
2025
I. Philosophical Abstract
This work presents a unified systematic philosophy grounded in the proposition that information is ontologically primary. Drawing on contemporary physics, information theory, evolutionary biology, and embodied cognitive science, it argues that the fundamental nature of reality is informational — that matter and energy are manifestations of informational structure rather than its substrate.
The framework proceeds through six interlocking claims:
Reality is physically real and mind-independent, but its deepest nature is informational. Following John Wheeler's "it from bit," physical entities derive their existence from informational distinctions rather than the reverse.
Information is anti-entropic, organising matter-energy into complexity through logically distinct hierarchical levels — physical, chemical, biological, cognitive, and self-conscious. Each level is irreducible to but continuous with the one below, in a structure analogous to Gödel's incompleteness hierarchy.
Life is the threshold at which information becomes self-replicating. The evolutionary imperative to survive and replicate is the origin of salience — the capacity to register relevance — which is the foundational cognitive primitive from which causal reasoning, similarity detection, and metaphorical extension all derive.
Self-consciousness is a necessary emergent property of sufficiently complex biological information-processing. Following Damasio, there is no mind-body distinction: subjective experience is what embodied biological self-reference feels like from the inside at sufficient logical depth. The hard problem of consciousness dissolves once its false premise — the Cartesian division of mind and body — is removed.
All knowledge is mediated by embodied, evolved cognition operating through three mechanisms — causation, similarity, and metaphor — which themselves reduce to the more primitive capacity for survival-relevant salience. Because these mechanisms are universal outputs of physical and evolutionary necessity, everything knowable is necessarily connected. The distinction between "everything connects" and "everything we can know connects" is an empty metaphysical conceit, dissolved by a principled verificationism.
Ethics follows necessarily from ontology. The self is not a sealed unit but a node embedded in expanding circles of informational relation — body, others, community, biosphere, cosmos. Correctly understanding one's own nature as a relational, transient, embodied informational system entails the Golden Rule as an ontological necessity rather than a commandment. The appropriate stance is simultaneously that of steward and child of the universe.
The framework engages with and draws on Wheeler, Damasio, Bateson, Merleau-Ponty, Varela, Thompson, Lakoff, Johnson, Rovelli, Deutsch, and the Zen philosophical tradition, while arriving at an original synthesis that is realist, naturalist, and ethically substantive.
II. Book Chapter Outline
The work is structured in six chapters, each building on the last. The argument is cumulative: each chapter establishes the foundation for the next, and the ethical conclusions of the final chapter follow necessarily from the metaphysical commitments of the first.
Chapter One: What is Real?
The Ontological Foundation
This chapter establishes the framework's fundamental commitment: reality is physically real and mind-independent, but its deepest nature is informational. It opens by examining the question of what it means to ask what is fundamental, distinguishing the question of what exists from the question of what exists most basically.
The chapter traces the convergence of physics, mathematics, and philosophy toward an informational ontology. Wheeler's "it from bit" is presented not as speculation but as the conclusion of decades of rigorous work on quantum mechanics and the measurement problem. Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics provides the most rigorous contemporary physics framework: reality at bottom is a network of relations, not a collection of things.
The chapter addresses the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics — why abstract mathematical structures describe physical reality so precisely — arguing that this is no longer mysterious if reality and mathematics share the same ontological foundation in pure informational structure.
KEY ARGUMENTS
Why the question of fundamentality matters for everything downstream
From matter-primary to information-primary: the physics case
Wheeler's participatory universe and its implications
Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics as the most defensible current physics
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics — dissolved
Chapter Two: How Complexity Arises
Information, Entropy, and the Hierarchy of Levels
Given an informational ontology, this chapter explains how complexity arises. Information is anti-entropic: it organises matter-energy into stable, self-reinforcing structures that locally decrease entropy while respecting the second law globally. The chapter traces this process from the formation of physical structures — particles, atoms, stars, galaxies — through chemistry to the threshold of life.
The central theoretical move is the introduction of the hierarchy of logical levels. Drawing on Russell's theory of types and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the chapter argues that each level of complexity represents information operating at a higher logical type, organising the level below as its substrate while being genuinely irreducible to it. This is not mere emergence in the weak sense — it is a structural claim about the logical distinctness of levels that have direct implications for explanation, reduction, and the nature of scientific knowledge.
The chapter closes by examining the threshold of life as the point at which information becomes self-replicating — and argues, drawing on Schrödinger, Kauffman, and England, that this threshold is a thermodynamic attractor rather than an improbable accident.
KEY ARGUMENTS
Information as anti-entropic: the thermodynamic case
The Gödelian hierarchy: logical levels as genuinely distinct
Why reduction fails between levels — and why that's not a problem
Life as thermodynamic attractor: self-replication as information's next move
The universe has a direction — not teleological, but structural
Chapter Three: How We Know
Embodied Cognition and the Structure of the Knowable
This chapter develops the framework's epistemology. All knowledge is mediated by embodied, evolved cognition. The chapter draws extensively on Lakoff and Johnson's work on conceptual metaphor, Rosch's prototype theory of categorisation, and the enactivist tradition of Varela, Thompson, and Merleau-Ponty to argue that our cognitive tools are not arbitrary human quirks but universal outputs of physical and evolutionary necessity.
Three mechanisms — causal reasoning, similarity detection, and metaphorical extension — structure all human knowledge. These reduce to a single, more primitive capacity: survival-relevant salience, the evolved ability to register what matters for continued existence and replication. Because these mechanisms are the inevitable product of embodied evolution in a causal world, any sufficiently complex evolved intelligence would converge on them. The knowable world is necessarily connected — not because we impose connection on a disconnected reality, but because connection is intrinsic to what information is, and our cognitive tools are themselves informational systems tracking informational structure.
The chapter deploys a principled verificationism to close the apparent gap between "everything connects" and "everything we can know connects." If no possible experience could discriminate between these claims, the distinction is empty. This is not a retreat to anti-realism but a disciplined rejection of metaphysical conceits that outrun any possible evidence.
KEY ARGUMENTS
Why embodiment matters: cognition is not computation in a vacuum
The three mechanisms and their common root in salience
Why the three mechanisms are universal, not parochially human
Everything connects: the epistemological case
Verificationism as philosophical discipline, not doctrine
Chapter Four: What Consciousness Is
Experience, Self-Reference, and the Dissolution of the Hard Problem
This is the chapter where the framework makes its most ambitious claim: the hard problem of consciousness dissolves once its false premise is removed. Following Damasio's neuroscience and the broader enactivist tradition, the chapter argues that there is no mind-body distinction to be bridged. Subjective experience is what biological self-reference feels like from the inside at sufficient logical depth.
The chapter traces the emergence of experience through the biological hierarchy: from cellular metabolism and homeostatic regulation, through the somatic marker system, through perception and cognition, to full self-conscious reflection. At each level, the logical type distinction is maintained — each level is irreducible to the one below — but nowhere is there a gap requiring the introduction of non-physical explanatory resources.
Self-consciousness is identified as the level at which information achieves full self-reference: the system models itself as the system doing the modelling. This is the Gödelian structure applied to mind. The chapter argues that this level is a necessary emergent property of the universe's informational structure — not an accident of one planet's evolution but a predictable culmination of what information does when given sufficient complexity and time.
KEY ARGUMENTS
Damasio: feelings as the brain's map of the body's state
Homeostasis as the foundation of salience and subjectivity
The biological hierarchy and the emergence of experience
Self-consciousness as necessary emergence, not lucky accident
The hard problem dissolved: why the question assumes what it needs to prove
Chapter Five: The Connected Self
Identity, Relation, and Participation
Having established the nature of reality, complexity, knowledge, and consciousness, this chapter turns to the nature of the self. It argues that the self is not a sealed unit but a node in a network of informational relations running from the biological substrate of the body outward through other persons, communities, ecosystems, and the physical universe.
The chapter examines the pre-conscious universe's relationship to the participation paradox — who was doing the participating before observers existed — and resolves it by arguing that participation, in the relevant sense, was always occurring at every level of informational self-organisation. Human self-consciousness adds not participation but self-aware participation: the universe not just organising itself but knowing that it is doing so.
The chapter explores the acceptance of transience as a necessary condition of significance rather than its negation. Drawing on connections with Zen philosophy and Heidegger's being-toward-death, it argues that mortality is constitutive of the salience-driven significance that makes life meaningful, not its enemy. The chapter closes by establishing the dual stance of steward and child as the appropriate orientation of a self-conscious being that correctly understands its own nature.
KEY ARGUMENTS
The relational self: constituted by connections, not merely in them
The participation paradox dissolved
Transience as condition of possibility, not deficiency
Zen and the rejection of false transcendence
Steward and child: the two aspects of embedded self-consciousness
Chapter Six: How to Live
Ethics as Ontological Necessity
The final chapter derives ethics from the metaphysics. It argues that the Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have done to you — follows necessarily from a correct understanding of the relational, embedded, informational nature of the self. This is not an argument from sentiment, authority, or rational universalisability. It is an argument from ontology.
The chapter maps the expanding circles of connection — body, others, community, locality, nation, biosphere, cosmos — and shows that each circle represents a genuine level of the informational hierarchy within which selfhood is embedded and by which it is co-constituted. To damage those connections is not merely imprudent or immoral in an abstract sense — it is a form of self-harm in the most literal sense the framework allows.
The chapter closes by reflecting on what it means to live as a self-conscious informational being in an entropic universe: accepting transience, acting with care for the expanding circles of connection, maintaining epistemic humility about the limits of embodied cognition, and finding significance not in cosmic endorsement but in the first-person reality of embodied experience — which is, on this framework, the universe knowing itself.
KEY ARGUMENTS
Ethics from ontology: why the derivation is genuine, not rhetorical
The Golden Rule as structural consequence of relational selfhood
The expanding circles and their ethical weight
Epistemic humility as ethical requirement
Living well in an entropic universe: significance without transcendence
III. Public Essay
For Aeon, IAI, or similar educated general audience publication. (~2,000 words)
The Universe That Knows Itself
Why everything connects — and what that means for how we live
"Consciousness might not be important to the Universe. But it sure as hell is important to me."
Start with something you probably believe: that the world is real. Not a simulation, not a dream, not a projection of your mind. Genuinely, stubbornly, independently real — full of things that existed long before you arrived and will persist long after you leave. Rocks. Stars. Other people. The laws of physics.
Now add something that physics has been quietly telling us for a century: that at the most fundamental level, reality might not be made of stuff at all. It might be made of information.
This is not mysticism. It is the conclusion that physicist John Wheeler — one of the giants of 20th century physics, the man who coined the term "black hole" — arrived at after decades of work on quantum mechanics. He called it "it from bit." Every particle, every field, every physical event derives its existence from informational distinctions — from differences that make a difference. The universe, at bottom, is not a collection of things. It is a network of relations.
If that sounds abstract, consider what follows from it. Information is anti-entropic: it builds structure, complexity, and order against the universe's tendency to dissolve everything into undifferentiated equilibrium. Given time and energy, information does something remarkable. It organises. First into physical structures — particles, atoms, stars, galaxies. Then into chemistry. Then, at a threshold that may be a thermodynamic attractor rather than an improbable accident, into life.
Life is what happens when information learns to replicate itself. And replication, over evolutionary time, produces something extraordinary: a nervous system capable of modelling the world it inhabits. A mind.
The Tools We Were Given
The mind is not a neutral window onto reality. It is a tool shaped by four billion years of evolution in a specific kind of world — a world of physical objects, causal processes, recurring patterns, and mortal stakes. The cognitive tools we use to make sense of experience — causal reasoning, pattern recognition, metaphorical thinking — were not chosen for their philosophical purity. They were selected because they worked well enough to keep our ancestors alive long enough to reproduce.
This matters more than it might seem. Our deepest cognitive capacity is not logic or language or abstract reasoning. It is salience: the evolved ability to register what matters, what is relevant to continued existence. Everything else is downstream of that. We track causes because causes are how we intervene in the world. We recognise similarities because generalising from past experience is metabolically cheaper than learning everything from scratch. We think in metaphors because abstract reality only becomes navigable when mapped onto the embodied, physical experience we already understand.
These tools are not arbitrary human quirks. They are the predictable output of physical and evolutionary pressures that hold across the universe. Any embodied intelligence — anywhere, shaped by the same fundamental physics and the same logic of natural selection — would converge on them. They are universal not because they are logically necessary but because the universe leaves very little room for alternatives when it comes to building a mind that works.
Why Everything Connects
Here is the consequence: because our cognitive tools are informational systems tracking an informational universe, and because information is inherently relational — a piece of information only means anything in relation to other information — the knowable world is necessarily a connected whole. Not connected in a vague, hand-waving sense. Connected in a precise, structural sense: every phenomenon arrives trailing causal ancestors and implying causal descendants; every new thing is understood through its similarity to things already known; every abstract domain is navigated through metaphorical mapping from embodied experience.
There is no island of pure isolation in the knowable world. Not because reality magically coheres, but because any mind shaped by evolution to navigate a causal, pattern-rich, physically real universe will necessarily encounter it as a web of relations.
Some will object: perhaps reality is disconnected, and we merely impose connection on it. But this objection collapses under scrutiny. If no possible experience could ever reveal a difference between "everything connects" and "everything we can know connects," then the distinction is empty — a metaphysical conceit dressed up as a deep insight. A disciplined philosophy rules out claims that no evidence could touch.
What Consciousness Actually Is
Now we reach the question that has occupied philosophers for centuries and generated more confusion than almost any other: what is consciousness, and why does it feel like something to be alive?
The question only seems mysterious because it inherits a false assumption: that mind and body are two different kinds of thing, and that explaining the physical leaves the mental mysteriously unaccounted for. Descartes planted this assumption in the 17th century and Western philosophy has been struggling with it ever since.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has spent decades dismantling it. The self is not a ghost in a machine. It is the machine — or rather, it is what the machine feels like from the inside when it achieves sufficient biological complexity. Feelings are not mental events that correlate with bodily states. They are the brain's representation of the body's state. Consciousness is, at its root, a felt report on the condition of a living body that has survival at stake.
This fits precisely into the informational framework. Each level of the biological hierarchy — from cellular metabolism through hormonal systems through unconscious neural processing to felt experience to self-conscious reflection — represents information operating at a higher logical level, organising the level below while remaining irreducible to it. Experience is not a mysterious extra ingredient added on top of physics. It is what self-referential biological information processing is, encountered from the inside.
And self-consciousness — the capacity to reflect on one's own experience, to know that one knows — is the level at which the universe achieves full self-reference. Through us, the informational universe models itself. This is not poetry. It is a precise structural claim about what self-consciousness is and why it matters.
The Ethics That Follows
None of this is merely academic. It has direct consequences for how we should live.
If the self is not a sealed unit but a node in a network of informational relations — constituted by its connections to body, others, community, ecosystem, and cosmos — then the rigid boundary between self-interest and other-interest is less absolute than it appears. Not dissolved: the logical level distinction between selves is real. But permeable enough that harming another is revealed as a kind of category error, a failure to understand what you actually are.
The Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have done to you — is usually presented as a commandment, a piece of moral wisdom handed down by tradition. On this framework it is something stronger: an ontological necessity. It follows from what we are, not from what we are told.
The same logic extends outward through the expanding circles of connection: to other living beings, to ecosystems, to the physical substrate of life on this planet. These are not abstract duties. They are the natural expression of a correct understanding of the relational nature of selfhood. To be a steward of the biosphere is not self-sacrifice. It is self-understanding.
Living in an Entropic Universe
One question remains. If the universe tends ultimately toward heat death — maximum entropy, minimum information, the dissolution of all complexity — does any of this matter? Is the universe's self-knowledge through conscious beings a transient episode in a story that ends in nothing?
Yes. And that is exactly as it should be.
Transience is not the enemy of significance. It is its condition. A world without entropy would be a world without stakes — and without stakes, nothing would matter more than anything else. Salience, meaning, care, and love all require the genuine possibility of loss. Mortality is not a defect in the design of a conscious life. It is what makes a conscious life a life rather than an endless equilibrium.
The universe did not need to produce consciousness. There is no external purpose that required it. But it did — necessarily, as the logic of information building complexity through levels eventually, inevitably produces self-reference. And in that self-reference, the universe briefly, luminously, knows itself.
That knowing is transient. It is embodied. It is yours. It needs no external endorsement because significance is precisely what arises when an informational universe is met by a self-conscious system that has survival at stake and love in its heart.
Here we are. That is enough.
IV. Literature Map
Key thinkers and works to engage with for academic rigour, grouped by domain.
1. Informational Ontology and Physics
These are the primary scientific and philosophical sources for the framework's foundational commitment to information as ontologically primary.
Wheeler, J.A. — "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links" (1989). The primary source for "it from bit." Essential reading; your framework is in direct dialogue with this.
Rovelli, C. — Relational Quantum Mechanics (1996) and Reality Is Not What It Seems (2016). The most rigorous current physics framework consonant with your ontology. Accessible and rigorous.
Deutsch, D. — The Fabric of Reality (1997) and The Beginning of Infinity (2011). Information and knowledge as fundamental physical phenomena. Strong overlap with your framework's cosmological implications.
Zeilinger, A. — "A Foundational Principle for Quantum Mechanics" (1999). Argues that quantum physics is fundamentally about information. Rigorous physics.
Floridi, L. — The Philosophy of Information (2011). The most comprehensive academic philosophical treatment. Useful for situating your framework in current debates.
2. Complexity, Emergence, and Life
These works support the claim that complexity and life are thermodynamic attractors rather than accidents.
Schrödinger, E. — What Is Life? (1944). The founding text of the idea that life feeds on negative entropy. Short, accessible, and still important.
Kauffman, S. — The Origins of Order (1993) and At Home in the Universe (1995). Self-organisation and complexity as attractors. Technically demanding but important.
England, J. — "Statistical Physics of Self-Replication" (2013). Recent physics arguing that life-like organisation is thermodynamically favoured. Cutting edge.
Chaisson, E. — Cosmic Evolution (2001). Maps increasing energy rate density across cosmic scales, providing empirical grounding for the directionality claim.
Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. — Order Out of Chaos (1984). Dissipative structures and the thermodynamics of complexity. Classic.
3. Embodied Cognition and Epistemology
These are the core sources for the framework's epistemology — the claim that knowledge is grounded in embodied, evolved, salience-driven cognition.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. — Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). The most comprehensive argument that abstract thought is grounded in embodied metaphor. Central to your three-mechanism account.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. — Metaphors We Live By (1980). Shorter, more accessible predecessor. Good starting point.
Merleau-Ponty, M. — Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The foundational philosophical account of embodied experience. Demanding but essential for academic credibility.
Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. — The Embodied Mind (1991). Enactivism: the synthesis of cognitive science and phenomenology most consonant with your framework.
Thompson, E. — Mind in Life (2007). Extends the enactivist programme. More recent and technically developed than The Embodied Mind.
Rosch, E. — "Principles of Categorization" (1978). The empirical foundation for prototype theory of concepts — directly supports your similarity mechanism.
4. Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness
These works are essential for the chapter dissolving the hard problem.
Damasio, A. — Descartes' Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Self Comes to Mind (2010). The three key books. Together they constitute the most empirically grounded argument against the mind-body distinction. Central to your framework.
Chalmers, D. — The Conscious Mind (1996). The canonical statement of the hard problem. You need to engage with this to show your dissolution is serious, not evasive.
Dennett, D. — Consciousness Explained (1991). The most developed deflationary account. You agree with Dennett that the hard problem is misconceived, but your dissolution is more biologically grounded.
Metzinger, T. — Being No One (2003) and The Ego Tunnel (2009). The self as a representational model. Compatible with your framework and useful for the self-consciousness chapter.
Nagel, T. — "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974). The classic statement of the problem of subjective experience. Engage with this to show awareness of the strongest objections.
5. Systematic Metaphysics and Ontology
These are the philosophical predecessors in systematic metaphysics — important for situating the work in its tradition.
Spinoza, B. — Ethics (1677). The model for ethics derived from metaphysics. Your framework is the closest contemporary equivalent in ambition.
Whitehead, A.N. — Process and Reality (1929). The most developed process metaphysics. Technically demanding but important as the main precedent for a non-substance ontology.
Bateson, G. — Mind and Nature (1979) and Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Information as the pattern connecting all living things. Remarkably consonant with your framework and more accessible than Whitehead.
Kant, I. — Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The foundational transcendental argument. Your framework is a naturalised Kantianism — you need to show awareness of what you're building on and departing from.
Lewis, D. — On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). The main alternative: a pluralist ontology of distinct, externally related particulars. Engage with this as the strongest opposing view.
6. Ethics and the Philosophy of Life
These support the ethical conclusions and their grounding in the metaphysics.
Parfit, D. — Reasons and Persons (1984). The most rigorous recent treatment of personal identity and its ethical implications. Directly relevant to your relational self.
Heidegger, M. — Being and Time (1927). Being-toward-death as constitutive of authentic existence. Supports your account of transience as condition of significance.
Singer, P. — The Expanding Circle (1981). The philosophical case for extending moral concern outward. Your framework grounds this in ontology rather than utilitarian argument.
Naess, A. — Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989). Deep ecology and the relational self. Your framework provides the metaphysical foundation this tradition needs.
Dogen — Shobogenzo (13th century). The Zen philosophical text most resonant with your framework's conclusions. Particularly relevant to the transience chapter.
7. Journals and Publication Venues
For academic publication, these are the most appropriate venues for a synthetic, interdisciplinary work.
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy — explicitly welcomes synthetic and speculative philosophy of the kind you have developed.
Metaphilosophy — publishes work on the nature and methodology of philosophy. Appropriate for the framework's epistemological claims.
Biology and Philosophy — for the chapters on life, emergence, and embodied cognition.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences — for the consciousness and embodiment chapters.
Aeon Magazine — the best venue for the public essay. Reaches a large, educated, intellectually serious audience.
IAI (Institute of Art and Ideas) — publishes philosophical essays and hosts debates. Good for public-facing work.
Substack — for building an audience before or alongside formal publication. Allows iterative development and direct reader engagement.
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