Life, the universe and everything in it is information. Information is the smallest product of everything there is. It can describe physical matter and actions, events and ideas.
Imagine a leaf. One can look at this leaf and describe it briefly to a friend. The leaf is green, it has veins, and it is succulent. These three pieces of information can be used by most of us to create a rough picture of the leaf in our brains. Then we look further. We can see how the colour of the leaf is different on the underside. This can be broken down into two pieces of information: the backside of the leaf has a different colour and the backside of the leaf is a darker green.
We can then explain the shape and how the veins are spread. Looking with a microscope, we can describe the cells within it, and in turn how these are shaped and distributed. Going further in our quest to know more information, we can look at the leaf's history and learn to which tree it belongs. We can try and learn how old it is, from its rate of decay, and who or what made it fall off the tree.
Every piece of information we obtain about this one little leaf is not equivalent to the information we can obtain for a similar leaf from the same tree. Now imagine that the tree has thousands of leaves and that there are thousands of trees in this patch of land. Our tiny human brains could never manage to obtain all of the information stored within a single leaf, far less within a whole garden.
Yet, the information is there, stored in every material object and in every action or happening. For the universe, the past and present are indifferent for they are part of this information. For us it may seem that to know how that single leaf fell from the tree is rather impossible. And we might try to guess what would happen to the leaf with time, but it is beyond our capabilities to keep track of what happens to all the leaves in the garden. For the universe, what happened or what will happen to the leaf are only part of the matrix of information encoded within its space-time continuum.
It could be possible, therefore, that if we manage to find what links the past and the future with the present, we could obtain information from either that which has already happened or from what shall still come.
It is fairly easy to understand how one can learn of the past. We cannot observe it directly, but we can obtain information from it through other means. We can observe the change in this information. See how the leaf decays and calculate backwards the time it took for it to do so. This of course, will always be an assumption, for how can we know that a decayed leaf we picked up has decayed with time similarly to all the other leaves? For all we know, a leaf might have fallen from a tree and instantly decayed without us ever observing it.
To obtain information from the future is another thing all together. To know what can happen in the future, one needs to know all possible outcomes of all possible choices that happen. We need to break down every event that occurs into two choices, either a or b.
When we pick up the leaf, we can either put it back on the floor, or take it home with us. When we pick up the leaf, we can either break it in half or keep it intact. These four scenarios are all equivalent possible future timelines for one event; picking up the leaf. Yet all of them exist at the same time in the present and any one of them can unfold into reality as we manifest our choice.
We can therefore say that the future already exists, and all the possible choices we can ever make are already laid down before us. The future, much like the past, is therefore information within the universe.
As human beings, we have been given the chance to obtain and assimilate an unimaginably small proportion of all the information stored in the universe. It is of course unnecessary to know all information within the universe, and that is why we dedicate our lives to learning about the largest questions that concern us; how can we survive? how do things grow or work the way they do?
We do not waste much time in understanding the intricate patterns in nature that are fundamentally engraved within the fabric of the universe. This detaches us from the reality of life; that we, and everything around us are simply a matrix of information.
