Perhaps we should not be entirely surprised that information appears to underpin reality. When we build simulations of physical systems — from weather models to particle colliders to entire virtual worlds — we don’t simulate matter. We simulate information. We encode rules, relationships, and constraints, and matter-like behaviour emerges from them. The simulation doesn’t contain anything solid. It contains structured data that behaves as if it does. If our most successful models of reality are built from information rather than substance, perhaps that tells us something about the reality they’re modelling.
There is something else worth noticing. Our simulations are not three-dimensional at their foundation. They are lists of rules, numbers, and relationships — dimensionless information stored on flat media. And yet when we run them, a three-dimensional world emerges. Characters move through space, objects have weight and resistance, light behaves as light does. The depth, the volume, the apparent physicality — none of it exists in the underlying code. It arises from it. We have already built, many times over, systems where a dimensionless informational substrate gives rise to an apparently solid, spatial, experienced reality. We did not find this surprising. Perhaps we should have paid more attention to what we were demonstrating.
There is a deeper parallel still. When we play a video game, we sit outside the world we’re navigating — controller in hand, screen in front of us, clearly separate from the character we’re moving through space. But what if that distance collapsed? What if instead of guiding the character from outside, you stepped into them — became the pattern itself, experiencing the world from within rather than observing it from without? That is precisely our situation. We are not players holding a controller. We are the characters — coherent patterns of information rippling through an emergent three-dimensional world, with no view from outside, no screen between us and the field. We experience the simulation as reality because from inside a sufficiently coherent pattern, there is no difference.
You can read all of this, nod along intellectually, and then put the book down, pick up your coffee cup, feel its solid weight in your hand, and think — yes, but this feels completely real. The cup is there. My hand is here. Whatever is happening at the level of quarks and entropy gradients is simply irrelevant to the world I actually live in.
But consider this. You have never actually touched anything. Not once in your life. What you experience as touch is the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons in your fingertips and the electrons in the surface of the cup. You feel resistance — and you interpret that resistance as solidity. But nothing is making contact. Two fields are pushing back against each other, and your nervous system translates that push into the sensation of a solid object in a solid world.
The solidness you feel is real. It is just not what you think it is. It is not matter meeting matter. It is coherence meeting coherence — two stable patterns in the field, maintaining their structure in relation to each other. The cup doesn’t need to be solid in the classical sense to feel solid to you. It just needs to be coherent enough to resist your field with its own.
So the physics isn’t irrelevant to your experience. It is your experience, translated into the only language your nervous system knows how to speak.
Fair enough. So what?
Here is what. If you are a solid object in a container, then you are fundamentally separate. Separate from other people, separate from the world around you, separate from whatever came before you and whatever comes after. Your life is a brief transit through an indifferent universe, bounded by skin and ended by death. That is one story.
But if you are a coherent pattern in a field that connects everything — if the boundary between you and the world is not a wall but a gradient, if the void substrate that gives rise to you gives rise equally to every other person, every star, every particle — then separation is not the fundamental truth of your existence. It is a feature of the scale at which you operate. Zoom out far enough and the edges dissolve.
This doesn’t change what you have for breakfast. But it might change how you hold grief, or loneliness, or the fear of death. It might change whether you experience your life as something happening to an isolated object, or as something being expressed through a pattern that was never truly separate from the whole.
The physics matters not because it changes the feeling of the coffee cup. It matters because it changes the story you tell about what you are. And the story you tell about what you are changes everything.