Right away in his now famous position paper, he hits us with what he calls “the age-old question”
“How come existence?”
This is a critical ontological question that we must necessarily keep close to our heart; it helps us stay humble in our never-ending quest to understand this world.
What a layperson (or at least what this layperson) might get from Wheeler’s “it-from-bit” hypothesis is the primacy given to an information binary in understanding material reality at its most basic.
As Wheeler puts it: “every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications” further summarizing, “that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”
This binary is not that different from other inescapable dualities we deal with every day – life & death, yes & no, light & dark, sustenance & fecal matter.
I can appreciate this. Using immaterialism to explain our material existence might sound borderline whackadoo, but here’s the thing: the deeper we look into understanding our material existence – the more quanta we discover – the more immaterial our hypotheses keep becoming (with some mind-boggling technological advances further aiding our capacity to observe both, the sub-atomic and the pan-galactic).
This does not reduce our material existence to some blind, faith-based immaterialism, as religious dogmatists would like to see happen. Rather it suggests that our focus on the immaterial must increase with greater scientific rigor and discovery. Just as there can be no understanding of life without an understanding of death, so too can there be no understanding of the material without an understanding of the immaterial.
Then as a starting point, perhaps it is not so much “How come existence?” as much as it might be “Why not non-existence?”
Essentially, we must ask ourselves:
What is nothing?
We know now that we can only understand reality, life, existence – this “something” – if we understand nothing; an endeavor we will only ever partially succeed in of course, until self actualizing the process.
Therein lies the tragicomic wonder of trying to understand our reality, something Wheeler himself admits to in the end:
“A single question animates this report: Can we ever expect to understand existence?”
The answer is simple (and socratic):
No. (But we must keep trying nonetheless).
love liberation struggle 