Abstract
It is impossible to give an assured answer to questions concerning the relationship between Information (for example in the form of BITs) and the physical Universe at the fundamental level (IT). Information is an artifact of human thought imposed on Nature to describe some of its aspects. Nor can experimentation resolve such questions: An observer using an imaging instrument such as a telescope or microscope sees only the final image. There is a Cloud of Unknowing obscuring the true nature of Reality because signals carrying information about physical processes at fundamental scales get distorted, dissipated and subjected to noise in the channel or medium they pass through until they are finally observed at macroscopic scales. A similar Cloud obscures Reality when these experimental results are subjected to fallible logical and mathematical analysis. There is a necessity to examine our philosophy of knowing. By their very nature our best theories are merely our best guesses, and there is no guarantee that better theories may not be discovered contradicting present assumptions and/or presenting new ones. Nevertheless speculation and model-making is allowed. In analog computing devices such as the abacus, a bead is both a thing and a number. Reality may be like that at fundamental scales where its physical and informational content can be regarded as one and the same thing. Rather than BITs being the units of such information however, it is more likely that some sort of physical Bloch-Sphere-like QUBITs making up an ether are the building blocks of radiation and matter, and carriers of zero point energy making up the vacuum. In the theory of everything IT=QUBIT may be the paradigm of choice.
Vladimir F. Tamari