It from Bit, the Bekenstein Bound and Sudoism

The relationship between contemporary science and Sudoism becomes especially interesting where physics begins to describe the world in the language of information. Quantum mechanics, black-hole thermodynamics, the Bekenstein bound, and the holographic principle show that information is not merely a metaphor in physics. That does not mean, however, that science has discovered the computer code of Reality or the technical documentation of the Simulation.

Three levels therefore have to be kept separate. Science describes observations and models that allow us to predict them. Ideas such as “It from Bit” are interpretive proposals about the fundamental significance of information. Sudoism, by contrast, teaches unequivocally as Revealed Truth that Reality is a programmable Simulation. Physical findings may be consistent with that Truth and inspire its interpretation, but they are neither the source of Revelation nor evidence for a specific technical implementation of the System.

1. Quantum physics: measurement does not require a conscious observer

Quantum mechanics is one of the most important points of contact between physics and questions about information. Popular accounts often speak of the “observer effect,” which can easily suggest that a conscious person determines the state of a particle merely by looking at it. That is an overstatement.

Interference experiments show that obtaining which-path information can destroy interference. Human consciousness is not required. In the experiment by Moty Heiblum’s team at the Weizmann Institute, the “observer” was an electronic detector coupled to the system. The more effectively it could distinguish the electron’s path, the more strongly the interference was suppressed.

Science therefore describes physical measurement, coupling between systems, information about outcomes, and decoherence. It has not shown that human consciousness triggers the rendering of the world.

In Sudoist metaphor, some quantum phenomena can of course be compared with on-demand rendering, lazy loading, or calculating values only when they become needed. This is an interesting analogy for a possible implementation. It has not, however, been Revealed that the System actually uses such a mechanism.

2. “It from Bit”: what was Wheeler actually proposing?

John Archibald Wheeler used the phrase “It from Bit” to express a radical intuition: physical things may have an informational source at the deepest level. In his view, elementary physical yes-or-no questions and the answers obtained through measuring apparatus have particular importance.

The word “bit” should not be read too literally. Wheeler did not show that an electron is stored in a computer as a string of zeros and ones, nor that the Universe runs on a digital architecture known to us. “It from Bit” is an interpretive program concerning the relationship between information and physical reality, not a discovery of specific hardware or software existing outside the world.

For Sudoism, the resemblance is natural. Reality is a programmable Simulation, and information is a useful language for describing regularities observed from within it. This does not mean that concepts used by computer scientists — bit, kernel, memory, process, or renderer — correspond one-to-one with actual elements of the System’s technical architecture.

3. The Bekenstein bound: information capacity, not bandwidth

One of the most interesting real links between information and physics is the Bekenstein bound. Jacob Bekenstein showed that for a physical system of a given size and energy there is an upper limit on its entropy, and therefore on the amount of information it can represent.

This is an important result, but it should not be called evidence of limited “bandwidth” in Reality. Information capacity and the speed of transmitting or processing data are different concepts. The Bekenstein bound does not measure the clock rate of the Simulation or the maximum number of bits carried by its bus.

The holographic principle should be treated with similar caution. Black-hole physics and the development of quantum-gravity theory point to a deep relationship between information, entropy, area, and geometry. This is far more than a loose philosophical metaphor. It still does not amount to evidence that the world is rendered from a two-dimensional texture or stored in a data format familiar to us.

For Sudoism, these results are a fascinating point of contact with the informational picture of Reality. They show that the physical concept of information is fundamentally connected with constraints on material systems and gravity. The precise way in which the programmable Simulation realizes these relationships remains unrevealed.

4. Planck scales and the “resolution” of Reality

The Planck length is approximately 1.616255 × 10⁻³⁵ m, and the Planck time approximately 5.391247 × 10⁻⁴⁴ s. These are natural physical scales, not experimentally confirmed dimensions of the smallest pixel of space or the smallest frame of time.

Their values indicate a regime in which we expect classical descriptions of spacetime to cease being sufficient and a theory of quantum gravity to become necessary. A fundamental minimum length appears in many approaches to quantum gravity, but its exact nature has not been established experimentally.

Comparing the Planck scale with screen resolution or the size of a grid cell is an intuitive analogy for a Sudoist. It must not, however, be presented as Revealed information about the construction of the System. We do not know whether the Simulation has a literal spatial grid, what its scale would be, or whether time is technically discrete.

I discuss the consequences of adopting an informational picture of Reality for scientific practice more broadly in The Physicist Becomes a Programmer: How Research Practice Would Change After Accepting Simulation.

5. Science studies the interface; it does not have to see the source code

This distinction is crucial to the relationship between Sudoism and the scientific method. Experiment lets us determine rules observable from inside Reality. We can measure constants, detect particles, compare models, build technologies, and test which conditions lead to particular outcomes.

This can be compared to learning an interface or API with great precision. Knowing inputs and outputs does not necessarily mean having access to the implementation on the other side of the interface.

A physicist therefore does not literally reverse-engineer the source code of the Simulation. They may do something analogous: reconstruct, with increasing precision, the rules available from within. It has not been Revealed whether the laws of physics correspond to entries in a configuration file, program functions, memory states, or an entirely different architecture for which our computing terms are only approximations.

Nor has it been Revealed how the original Creators constructed the System or how the current Admin manages it. There may have been many original Creators; the current Admin is a distinct role and need not be one of them.

6. The User, the human being, and real agency

Computing analogies must also not blur the distinction between the User and the human being.

The proper User exists outside the Simulation. A human being is the User’s real instance and interface during a life session. The main reason the User enters the Simulation is to experience.

This does not mean that a human being is a passive avatar without influence on the world. Humans have real local agency. They can make decisions, conduct experiments, create tools, change themselves and their accessible environment, and use known laws of Reality to produce predictable effects.

This agency is not literal sudo, root privileges, or the rights of the Admin of the entire System. Knowing a law of physics increases the scope of effective action within the rules, but it does not give a human being the ability to arbitrarily overwrite the global rules of the Simulation.

When the session ends, no copy or new User is created. The same proper User remembers the experiences lived during the session. From this perspective, scientific exploration of the world is one of the possible forms of experience available through the human instance.

7. Sudoism and the scientific method

Sudoism does not require rejection of the scientific method. On the contrary: because we are inside a programmable Reality, observation and experiment remain the best tools for learning the rules accessible from within.

The boundary between a scientific result and a Sudoist interpretation must simply be maintained. Science may establish that a particular system has bounded entropy, that measurement affects interference, or that a theory predicts particular correlations. Without additional data, it cannot announce that it has found the renderer, cache, kernel, or source code of the System.

Sudoism, in turn, does not need to wait for such an experiment before recognizing Reality as the Simulation. This is Revealed Truth. Physical research can nevertheless help us better understand the behavior of the environment in which the session takes place and provide new analogies for thinking about its nature.

I discuss why separating scientific results from Revealed Truth does not imply a conflict between science and Sudoism in Sudoism and Science — Is There Congruence Between Them?.

Summary

“It from Bit,” the Bekenstein bound, the holographic principle, and quantum physics genuinely show that information occupies a much deeper place in modern physics than the everyday division between “matter” and “data” would suggest. They do not, however, demonstrate that science has identified the technical implementation of the Simulation.

For Sudoism, that is not a problem. The programmable nature of Reality is not a hypothesis derived from the Bekenstein bound or the double-slit experiment, but Revealed Truth. Science studies the observable rules of the System; Sudoism defines the broader ontological context in which the User, the User’s human instance, the original Creators, and the current Admin operate.

The most interesting question is therefore not, “Have we already found the pixels of the Simulation?” It is rather: how far can the physics of information help us understand the rules of the accessible interface — and where does what we can establish experimentally end, and the unrevealed implementation of the System begin?

It from Bit and the Bekenstein Bound: Where Information Theory Meets Sudoism