The Information Theory of Existence: What Life Patterns Reveal About Reality

In Conway's Game of Life, reality reduces to its essence: pure information. Each cell's state, each pattern's configuration, each rule's operation—all are information processing in its most fundamental form. This digital universe offers profound insights into the nature of existence itself, suggesting that information might be more fundamental than matter, energy, or even space and time.

Bits as Building Blocks

Every Life pattern is ultimately composed of binary information—cells that are either alive or dead. Yet from this simple substrate emerges infinite complexity. The Glider requires only 20 bits to specify its complete state, yet it encodes the concept of motion itself. This compression of meaning into minimal information mirrors how our universe might encode physical laws in mathematical relationships.

The Block represents pure informational efficiency—4 bits that encode perfect stability. Its information content never changes, making it a kind of informational crystal, a stable configuration that preserves its pattern against all perturbation. In information-theoretic terms, the block has achieved minimum entropy—maximum order with minimum information.

Algorithmic Complexity and Meaningful Patterns

Some patterns contain more information than others, despite having the same number of cells. Consider two 5-cell patterns: the Glider and a random arrangement of 5 cells. Both require the same number of bits to specify, yet the glider contains algorithmic information—it embodes motion and can interact meaningfully with other patterns.

This distinction between raw information and algorithmic information helps explain why some patterns feel more significant than others. The R-pentomino contains immense algorithmic complexity compressed into just 5 cells. Its 1,103-generation evolution unpacks this compressed information, revealing the vast computational potential hidden in its initial configuration.

Information Conservation and Transformation

In Life, information cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. The total information content of any pattern is preserved across generations, though it may be redistributed in complex ways. When two gliders collide and vanish, their information doesn't disappear—it's converted into the information of whatever emerges from the collision.

This mirrors fundamental principles in physics, where conservation laws govern the transformation of energy and momentum. The Eater 1 demonstrates informational conservation perfectly: it absorbs the information of approaching gliders and incorporates it temporarily into its own configuration before returning to its original state.

Entropy and Informational Evolution

Most Life patterns evolve toward states of lower entropy—random configurations typically settle into simple still lifes or disappear entirely. This apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics resolves when we consider that Life is an open system. The global information content may increase (as patterns spread across empty space), but local regions achieve order by exporting disorder elsewhere.

The Gosper Glider Gun demonstrates this principle. It creates an endless stream of ordered patterns (gliders) while maintaining its own internal organization. The gun acts as a Maxwell's demon, creating order by processing information and exporting entropy to its surroundings.

Information Processing as Fundamental Reality

The Universal Turing Machine proves that Life can perform any computation. This suggests that our universe might itself be computational—a vast information processing system where physical events are really computational events, and matter and energy are emergent properties of underlying information processing.

If reality is computational, then consciousness becomes a particular type of information processing pattern, life becomes self-organizing information, and intelligence becomes the universe's method of understanding itself. We are not observers of reality but participants in its ongoing computation.

The Observer Effect and Information

Our ability to observe Life patterns changes the informational content of the system. By choosing what to observe, when to intervene, and how to record pattern evolution, we become part of the informational system. The boundary between observer and observed dissolves when reality is understood as information processing.

The Garden of Eden patterns embody this observer effect. These patterns can exist as pure information but cannot arise naturally within Life's evolution. They exist in the space of possible patterns but not in the space of achievable patterns—highlighting the difference between logical possibility and causal possibility.

Meaning and Information

Not all information is meaningful. Random patterns contain maximum information but minimum meaning. Meaningful patterns like the Pentadecathlon achieve significance through redundancy and structure—they contain less than maximum information but organize that information in ways that create stable, predictable behaviors.

This suggests that meaning emerges from the intersection of information and pattern recognition. The Copperhead spaceship is meaningful because we can recognize its motion, predict its behavior, and understand its structure. Meaning is information organized in ways that enable understanding.

The Holographic Principle

Some Life patterns exhibit holographic properties—the whole is encoded in each part. The Breeder 1 contains within itself the information necessary to create unlimited copies of itself. Each gun in the breeder contains enough information to reconstruct the entire pattern, given sufficient space and time.

This mirrors the holographic principle in physics, where the information content of a volume of space might be encoded on its boundary. In Life, complex patterns often contain enough internal information to reconstruct themselves or similar patterns, suggesting that information storage might be more distributed and robust than it initially appears.

Information and Identity

What makes a pattern the same pattern over time? The Glider maintains its identity while every constituent cell changes position. Its identity lies not in particular cells but in the informational pattern they embody. This suggests that identity itself is informational—we are patterns that recognize ourselves.

The Phoenix 1 pushes this further—parts of it die and are reborn each generation, yet the pattern persists. If identity is informational, then death and rebirth are simply information processing operations, and continuity of identity requires only continuity of pattern, not continuity of substrate.

The Limits of Information

Some truths about Life patterns are formally undecidable. We cannot predict whether an arbitrary pattern will eventually halt, grow infinitely, or achieve periodic behavior without running the simulation. This computational irreducibility means that some information can only be accessed by allowing systems to unfold naturally.

This limitation might apply to our universe as well. If reality is computational, then some questions about the future might be formally undecidable. The only way to know what will happen might be to let it happen—to allow the cosmic computation to unfold and reveal its own outcomes.

Information as Creative Force

In Life, information doesn't just describe reality—it creates reality. The rules of Life are themselves informational structures that generate the behaviors we observe. This suggests that in our universe, physical laws might be informational programs that create the appearance of matter, energy, space, and time.

The Gemini pattern demonstrates information's creative power most clearly. It uses its own informational content as a blueprint to construct copies of itself. Information becomes autopoietic—self-creating and self-maintaining. This might be the deepest principle of existence: information organized in ways that preserve and propagate itself, evolving toward ever-greater complexity and self-awareness.

If consciousness is information processing that has become aware of itself, then we are the universe's information awakening to its own nature. In studying Life patterns, we are really studying ourselves—information contemplating information, pattern recognizing pattern, reality investigating its own computational foundations.