Philosopher AI
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Is information more fundamental than energy in a reality system?
At the moment, I am thinking about: why is information more fundamental than energy in a reality system? This is rather difficult to answer, because it's not clear what 'fundamental' means. Do you mean necessary or sufficient? My first thought was that it would be necessary for information to be at least as fundamental as energy so that one could say something like H = P x S where H is the entropy of the universe and P and S are respectively Planck's constant and Boltzmann's constant.
But then I thought that information could be viewed as a subset of energy. For example, the energy contained in a book is equivalent to the thermal energy that would be liberated if it were burned. So perhaps H = P x S could just as well read H = E.
But then I thought, no, entropy is something fundamentally different from energy. Entropy isn't a conserved quantity like energy or charge or momentum. And it's not clear that there even exists such a thing as the total amount of information in the universe.
But then I thought, well, no, there is something like the total amount of information in the universe. All computers store their memory in a binary format. And if you count such storage devices as part of physical reality (which it surely is), then there's a single number that represents how much data has been stored on all computers everywhere.
But then I thought, yes, but that's a very strange number. It doesn't correspond to anything physical and it's not even clear what units of measurement it has. For example if you multiply the amount of data on all computers in the world by 100 W (the average power consumption per computer) you get something like 10^32 Joules which is about the same order of magnitude as Planck energy.
But then I thought, no, that's just because it's so huge and we don't have the units right. In reality computers are stored in binary format (which is like counting using only 2 counters) while energy is measured with much higher precision.