It From Bit

Zac nodded. “So… so far, it’s more likely that reality and consciousness are the same thing, just based on a razor and this Bayesian thingo?”

“Yes! Exactly! It’s taken us a whole ten minutes to ascertain that the probability that reality and consciousness are the same thing is approximately equal to one. We’ve done this without even looking at any physical evidence. All we’ve used is a correct application of the scientific method and a simple application of Bayes’ theorem. At the risk of sounding somewhat conceited, I’m genuinely not sure what all these scientists have been doing for the past few hundred years because this isn’t exactly complex stuff. It’s pretty basic and self-evident when you think about it critically for two seconds. Anyway, let’s look at some actual evidence. Oh, wait…”

I leaned over to my laptop and loaded up an eighties song on Spotify, which promptly started playing as I lip-synced along.

Let’s get physic-al, physic-al. I wanna get physic-al. Let’s get into physic-al.

“Get it?” A huge, goofy smile spread across my face. “Zac, get it? Like, we’re going to look at some physics now.”

Zac groaned and stared at me, deadpan. “I’m pretty sure she’s talking about sex.”

“No shit, Sherlock. I was just being punny.” I stared back.

“You’re an idiot.”

“Zac!” I gasped. “Stop being so verbally abusive. I have a very fragile ego. Remind me why we’re friends again?”

“We’re friends,” Zac replied, “because eight years ago you rocked up at the university entrepreneurship society with my two mates, and both of them were competing to see who could get a date with you. And I wasn’t interested because I could see right through your shiny exterior to the derp within, and you liked that I wasn’t interested. So here I am, eight years later, still subjecting myself to your derpiness, still as romantically disinterested but platonically in love with you as I was all those years ago.”

“Naw,” I gushed. “That’s friendship, right there. My brother from another mother. Fist bump.”

Zac tapped his fist to mine. “Boom.”

“Okay, now back to physics.” I picked up a tattered book from my bedside table. ‘The Holographic Universe’ was printed on its creased and well-worn cover. It had been read and highlighted and earmarked and accidentally dropped in the bath so many times that its pages were falling out. One of them softly floated to the wooden floor before I could catch it.

“What is this made of?” I asked as I fastened the rogue page back into place.

“Err… paper?” Zac guessed.

“I mean, fundamentally. What is everything made of?”

“Molecules? Atoms? Energy?” he guessed again.

“Right!” I scrawled Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², onto the whiteboard. “Energy,” I said as I underlined the E. “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Matter is energy. Everything is energy. But what is energy?”

“I dunno,” Zac replied. “Isn’t energy all there is?”

“Not necessarily.” My lips curled into a cheeky smile. “You see, there are some big heavyweights in physics, like John Archibald Wheeler and-”

“Nikki,” Zac interjected. “Unless he is the face of a meme or regularly posts inane threads on Reddit, I have no fucking clue who John Archibald Wheeler is.”

“Well no, you won’t find him on Reddit — primarily because he is dead, but also because he was busy being a productive member of the physics community when he was alive. He came up with the phrase ‘black hole,’ and-”

“So he named the infinite abyss that is your mouth?”

I rolled my eyes. “Wheeler proposed something called ‘It From Bit.’ It’s the idea that everything at its most fundamental level, even more fundamental than energy, is information. Energy is information. And information is just binary: ones and zeros.”

“Oh! Like a computer?”

“Yes! Exactly like a computer. Everything that runs on a computer can be reduced to binary information: ones and zeros. But here’s where it gets interesting… if reality is information, is consciousness also just information?”

“No. Consciousness is… oh, wait — yes!”

“You’re catching on, Zachary.” I smiled to myself. “Why do you say yes?”

“Artificial-fucking-intelligence!”

My smile turned into a grin. “Artificial-fucking-intelligence is right! According to the laws of physics, there is nothing that should prevent us from building human-level general intelligence into a computer or uploading our own consciousness into a machine. So, given infinite time and resources, we will have human-level consciousness running on a machine at some point in the future.

Now, some people might say the machine is intelligent but not conscious. That’s actually a misguided assumption that can’t be defended from first principles. I’ll have to explain that later. If consciousness is a state of being aware of and responsive to one’s environment, human-level AI can definitely do that. So if we say that human-level consciousness is capable of running on a computer-”

“-then we have to say that consciousness is just information. It’s just ones and zeros.” Zac finished my thought.

“Exactly!” I started writing on the board again. “So if reality = information and consciousness = information, then they’re made of the same thing. Therefore, it’s more-likely-than-not that they are the same thing!”

I began making a tally on the whiteboard. Ockham’s Razor — tick for reality and consciousness are the same thing.  Bayesian rationality — tick for reality and consciousness are the same thing. Everything is information — tick for reality and consciousness are the same thing.