Information is real, but what does it look like? What does it weigh? What does it smell like?
Information is coded. The content of information is not dependent on the material on which it is written. It depends on the patterns that the language uses. Because of this, information has unique properties. For exemple it is weightless and odorless. Information is physically dependent on what it is coded upon to exist. This material is almost irrelevant. That gives it its ethereal properties.
Information is colorless and invisible of sorts. Taking apart a USB key, I could be looking at an important set of information but not be capable of even telling if it contains information.
This is important. I hold that spirit is not only very much like information and the processing of it. Spirit and information are in fact, the same thing. But furthermore, to be more precise, supernatural aspects of spirit simply do not exist.
Spirit is information like software and the processing of it. Information offers a more useful understanding of our selve.
Shared Information Is One of Humanity’s Greatest Inventions
Yuval Noah Harari has argued that one of the great strengths of our species is our ability to cooperate through shared fictions.
Money. Nations. Corporations. Laws. Human rights. Universities. Marriage. These things exist because billions of people collectively agree that they exist.
That insight is profound.
But I believe there is an even more accurate way to describe what is happening.
These are not merely fictions.
They are shared informational structures.
The Canadian dollar is not a hallucination. It exists as patterns of information distributed across millions of human brains, computer databases, bank accounts, legal systems, contracts, businesses, and daily actions. Remove that information, and the dollar disappears—not because the paper vanished, but because the informational network that gave it meaning collapsed.
The same is true of countries.
The border between Canada and the United States is not a wall stretching across every kilometre. It is an informational system maintained by maps, laws, governments, passports, courts, soldiers, and the expectations of hundreds of millions of people.
Companies are informational structures.
Universities are informational structures.
Scientific knowledge is an informational structure.
Languages are informational structures.
Even culture itself is a vast web of information passed from one generation to the next.
Seeing reality this way changes how we understand civilization.
Human history is not simply the history of matter.
It is the history of increasingly complex information becoming organized, stored, communicated, and acted upon.
Life itself is an informational process.
The brain is an informational process.
Civilizations are informational processes.
Perhaps the next great step is to stop dividing reality into the physical and the spiritual, and instead recognize the two inseparable aspects of our world:
The physical is the medium.
The informational is the organization.
Matter without information is chaos.
Information without matter cannot exist.
Together, they explain far more than either concept alone.
The informational self is simply the realization that the same principle that organizes DNA, brains, societies, and civilizations also organizes the person you call “I.”
Developed with ChatGPT 5.6