Is reality fundamentally made of information?

April 2, 2026

Is reality fundamentally made of information ? In this simple question there is a lot of complexity hidden beneath the surface.

In our everyday life, we assume reality is made of “stuff”. Things that we can interact with. But what if reality is not made of “stuff” at all, but rather of information?

Information, as first glance seems secondary: a book contains information, but the book is paper and ink. But what if that hierarchy is backward ? what if information is the primary substance, and what we call “matter” is just a particular pattern of information ?

But let slow down a second. Before going any further, we need to know and define what we are even talking about. Three words demand clarity: reality, fundamentally, and information.

What do we mean by “reality” ?

In everyday language, reality refers to the sum of all things that exist independently of our perception or thoughts. It is the world as it is, regardless of how we interpret it.

That is a good definition, yet we need to be more precise.

A useful distinction comes form ontology (the study of being and existence):

Everyday Reality : tables, tree, the support that you are reading the blog on. This is the world of middle-sized objects. Things that you can see, hear and interact with in a familiar way.
Scientific Reality : Here we are talking atomes, electrons, space-time curvature …
Fundamental Reality : This is the deepest level of reality, where the basic building blocks of existence are found. It is the level at which the laws of physics operate, and where information might be considered the most fundamental aspect of reality.

When we ask Is reality fundamentally made of information ? we are asking about that third level. Not whether my phone is information (it’s clear that it’s not only information, it has also mass, heat charge …), but whether, at the bedrock level, before anything else emerges, the stuff of reality is informational in nature.

What do we mean by “Fundamentally” ?

This is the trickiest part. Something is fundamental if it doest NOT depend on anything else for its existence. It is the ground floor of reality.

For example, one can say that atomes are the fundamental building blocks of everyday reality. However, atomes are made of protons neutrons and electrons, which are in turn made of quarks. So the question arises: what is the most fundamental level of reality? are quarks fundamental ?

Fundamentally also implies primacy in explanation. If you could explain everything else in terms of X, but you cannot explain X in terms of anything else, then X is fundamental. So the question becomes: can we explain matter, energy, space, and time in terms of information? And if we try to explain information in terms of matter, does that fail?

What do we mean by “information” ?

For Claude Shannon, he defined information as redcution of uncertainty. More precisely: The information content of a message is measured by how suprising it is. A coin flip that comes up heads gives you 1 bit of information because it could have gone either way. The sun rising tomorrow gives you almost 0 bits because you already knew it would happen.

This is what we call statistical information. In the other hand, there is also semantic information. The sentence “Brian is in the kitchen” contains information about the world. This is closer to what we mean in daily life. But it’s harder to formalize. Kitchen contains no semantic information on its own. Only when a mind interprets it, it start to “exist”.

Then for our third layer, there is physical information : Laundauer’s principle shows that information has physical reality. Erasing a bit generates heat. (see in the appendix for more details). Thus information is not just abstract; it’s deeply tied to entropy.

Finally, the last but not the least : Qauntum information: A qubit can be in a superposition of 0 and 1. It contains more possibilities than a classical bit. The quantum state of a particle is, arguably, a form of information about measurement outcomes.

To summarize. When we ask if reality is fundamentally made of information. We usually mean Shannon information or Quantum information (The mathematical, measurable physical kind). Not the meaning in a human brain. A single electron doesn’t know any “facts.” But its state can be described by a handful of bits.

Now we went from : Is reality fundamentally made of information ? to :

Are the ultimate, irreducible constituents of physical reality – the things that do not depend on any other things – constituted solely by discrete, quantifiable units of (perhaps quantum) information, such that what we call matter, energy, space, and time are emergent patterns of that information?