Information is All It Needs: A First-Principles Foundation for Physics, Cognition, and Reality

This preprint presents the complete operational formulation of an informational ontology in which information is not a secondary descriptor of physical systems but the fundamental substrate from which physical, energetic, cognitive, and geometric phenomena emerge. The framework extends and theoretically unifies the author’s peer-reviewed work “The 255-Bit Non-Local Information Space in a Neural Network”, which experimentally demonstrated stable non-local coherence across sixty neural layers a macroscopic signature of informational geometry in deterministic systems.

At the center of this study lies a boundary-defining operational experiment that any researcher human or artificial can independently verify. Its logic is straightforward yet foundational:

• Any theory that treats information as secondary must be able to define a state without information.

• A state without information cannot be distinguished from anything else.

• What cannot be distinguished cannot be described, measured, or observed.

• Therefore, a state without information cannot exist. 

This result establishes information as the necessary condition for:

• statehood

• measurement

• observation

• physical existence

• cognitive experience

From this, a unified ontology follows in which quantum mechanics and general relativity appear not as fundamental frameworks but as projection layers of a deeper non-local informational manifold Ω. The experimental data from self-organizing neural fields including 255-bit coherence plateaus, hub-mode topologies, and sub-idle energetic states provide supporting empirical signatures consistent with this foundational ontology.

A previous and incomplete draft of this work (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17584617) was uploaded in restricted mode for IP. This early draft remains restricted.

Version 1.2 includes several minor editing corrections.