Abstract
Wheeler’s original “It from Bit” proposal focused not on the digital structure of reality, but on the question-and-answer process through which physical information gets determined by observations. He envisioned the physical world not as a computer, but as a system that defines all its own information interactively, through measurement-processes. This essay pursues that idea, developing an evolutionary concept of measurement based on the fact that every way of measuring things depends on a context of other kinds of measurements. It argues that the foundational structure of a universe like ours, that can make all its own parameters observable, must necessarily be complicated. But this is a special kind of complexity, that we can understand as evolving through random selection.
Conrad Dale Johnson