'It is bit'. Being, Information, and the Manifest Pole

Being, at its most fundamental level, is not derived from information but is itself information, radicalizing Wheeler's 'it from bit' idea by eliminating its residual dualism. Absolute nothingness is impossible because positing it is self-contradictory. Necessary Being cannot be homogeneous, since the undifferentiated is indistinguishable from nothingness, so difference is a constitutive constraint of Being. Determining difference is the minimal definition of ontological information, making Being a network of differences. This identity holds only under the principle of operational determinacy: a difference is determinate only if, in at least one possible register, the distinction between its holding and not-holding is operative. Energy is reread as the recombinatory capacity of differences, and Consciousness as the transcendental pole of the manifest, distinct from empirical recognitions.

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Abstract

The article argues that Being, at its ontic level, does not derive from information but is information, radicalizing Wheeler’s program beyond the residual dualism of the formula ‘it from bit’. The argument proceeds subtractively: absolute nothingness is impossible because its positing is self-contradictory (§1); necessary Being cannot have the form of the homogeneous, since the undifferentiated is indiscernible from nothingness, so that difference is a constitutive constraint of Being (§2); but determining difference is the minimal definition of information in the ontological sense, hence Being is a network of differences (§3). The identity of Being and information holds, however, only within a bipolar structure, under a declared principle, the principle of operational determinacy: a difference counts as determinate only if, in at least one possible register, the distinction between its holding and its not-holding is operative. ‘Bare bits’, differences given to no possible register, are a mute monad, indiscernible from nothingness. On this basis energy is reread as the recombinatory capacity of differences (§4) and Consciousness as the transcendental pole of the manifest, rigorously distinct from empirical recognitions in act (§5); the ancestrality objection is dissolved by distinguishing the ontic reality of differences, conceded without reservation, from their being given as manifest. The proposal is compared with ontic structural realism, with informational structural realism, with relational quantum mechanics, and with the Severinian distinction between transcendental appearing and empirical appearing.