Strip a world down far enough and you don’t find a pile of things. You find relations. Patterns that hold. Constraints that refuse to budge. What we call matter shows up as the durable residue of rules—local regularities—rather than the other way around. Call this idea information as substrate: not “data” on a server, but the grammar beneath appearances, the way a system “remembers” its own formation. Some of this is old—physicists arguing that the “it” of the world rides on “bit,” philosophers claiming form before stuff. But it lands differently when you watch modern systems fail. Cities misremember. Algorithms learn too quickly and forget too completely. Institutions rot when their memory thins. The substrate shows.
There’s a particular tone that emerges once you take this seriously. Less obsession with objects. More attention to the constraints that carve objects into being. A canyon is not a rock; it’s an equation written by water across epochs. A mind is not a box; it’s a temporary compression of signals into something legible, then gone. The point isn’t mystical. It’s practical. If information—pattern, rule, record—is what persists, then designing, governing, even perceiving has to start one level lower, with the scaffolding that makes any surface stable. For a longer dive, see Information as substrate.
Patterns First: How Relations Precede Things
Think with your hands for a second. Take a sheet of metal. Score it along a lattice. Now flex. The bends appear where you set the constraints. Nothing “mystical” about it. The shape emerges because the instruction field was real before the deformation. The world behaves like this at multiple scales. Crystals aren’t just pretty; they’re the materialization of a symmetry rule. River deltas are archives of past flows, a memory of pressure and silt written in distributaries. Biological form—feathers, fronds, the folding brain—keeps surfacing as the downstream effect of growth rules plus boundary conditions. If you’re expecting “things” to lead, you keep getting surprised by how rules keep winning.
Physics leans hard in this direction. Don’t over-literalize any one program, but the recurring hint is the same: what we measure depends on relations among systems, the information exchanged, the invariants kept. Time? Less a universal river, more a local bookkeeping of change. Identity? A bundle of regularities across frames, not a metaphysical core. When rules stitch tightly, we say “object.” When they loosen, “process.” Either way, the persistent element is a structured pattern that can be compressed, transmitted, recovered. That is, information.
Everyday cases land the argument better than theory does. A path through snow hardens with each step; the path is a memory of prior choices, feeding back to make future choices more likely. A language shifts, then ossifies; grammar is social constraint that lets a sentence fly straight. Even markets—worshiped as spontaneous—only work because contract law, accounting norms, and reputations accumulate like sediment. The substrate is not hidden under the world. It is the world, seen as durable rule rather than flickering scene.
Confusions creep in when “information” gets mistaken for digital data. Bits on a drive are a parochial implementation. The broader sense is older: which alternatives are ruled out; which states still fit. A seed carries a program, yes, but so does a coastline freezing its own fractal. The program is not in a magical elsewhere. It lives as constraint. That’s why manipulation of symbols without respect to the substrate misleads. You can model a bridge in perfect vectors and still build a deadly one if you ignore the way steel “remembers” being stretched, the way wind writes new rules as it synchronizes oscillations. The lesson generalizes, and fast.
Mind, Moral Memory, and the Local Reader
On this view, consciousness is less a throne and more a read head. A local reception point riding a river of signals, compressing wildly, stitching discontinuities into something like a narrative. The “self” feels original, but most of what it draws on is inherited: language, ritual, categories, even what counts as “me.” Call the self a temporary compression—lossy, adaptive, occasionally unreliable—built for speed and survival, not for final truth. That sounds deflating until you see the power. Compressions travel. They generalize just enough to be shareable. They become culture.
Cultures build moral memory the way forests build soil—slowly, with layers of decay and renewal. Ritual isn’t silly theater; it’s an encoding scheme that keeps high-value behaviors present when explicit recall fails. Festivals carry allocations of attention. Taboos encode costly lessons learned the hard way. Common law is literally an accretion of past problem-solutions, compacted into precedent so future citizens don’t have to start from ash. Religion, if you drop the sneer and the sales pitch, reads as humanity’s oldest storage medium for long-horizon coordination: how not to eat seed corn, how to care for strangers, how to bind power to rule sets that outlast the ruler.
Consider the tsunami stones found on Japan’s coasts. Boulders carved with warnings—do not build below this line—placed after disasters across centuries. That’s information as substrate, civic-scale. A stone is not a database, yet it stores a binding constraint that organizes future action. Ignore it and pay. Or take the humble traffic circle, whose geometry encodes a rule about flow and right-of-way better than any sign screaming “Yield.” Bodies move correctly because the space holds the instruction. No deliberation needed.
The flipside: when informational scaffolding thins, minds degrade. A feed, optimized for click-through, erases memory of context. The scroll is an acid bath—destroys narrative cohesion, amplifies novelty, forgets costs. Institutions that once stored slow knowledge adopt “move fast” reflexes and burn their seed instructions. People then blame “human nature,” as if we aren’t exquisitely sensitive to the shape of our constraint fields. Change the substrate—alter feedback, latency, visibility—and you change the person you become at noon on a Wednesday.
Engineering on an Informational Base: AI, Institutions, and Design Choices
If the basic material is information, then engineering is substrate craft. Not app launches. Not PR. Tuning the rule-fields that make systems hold under stress. This has teeth in AI, where the prevailing habit is to toss enormous models at data and paper over failures with “guardrails.” What a telling metaphor. Thin rails, painted bright, after the machine already wants to veer. The deeper problem is that we’re building fast learners with almost no moral memory. Rapid adaptation without sedimentation. A culture of patches rather than constraints that have time to root. It works until it doesn’t—and when it doesn’t, the errors are social, not just statistical.
Corporate governance prefers “moral patching” because it performs well in audits. You can demo a filter. You can publish a policy. But if your training curricula, organizational incentives, and deployment feedback loops don’t encode slow constraints—don’t accumulate the equivalent of civic precedent—you get brittle intelligence that composes elegant nonsense and ergonomic harm. We then call for more filters. More brittle on brittle. The fix lies further down. Bake in latency that forces deliberation where stakes are high. Expose the model to counterfactual discipline (what if we were wrong, and how would we know?) so it grows structural caution rather than superficial refusal. Reward teams for discovering failure modes, not for suppressing their appearance. Constraint as first-class feature, not afterthought.
“Simulation” benefits from the same reframing. Not a dream of pixel-perfect virtuality, but a substrate metaphor: a world is “simulated” to the degree its rules are rule-like—compressible, transmissible, remixable without collapse. Video games that feel deep tend to have few rules strongly interacting, not countless features. By analogy, institutions that feel strong aren’t complicated; they’re simple constraints that change behavior across contexts. Sunset clauses. Disclosure that actually discloses. Public ledgers when secrecy invites decay. You can rotate these rules and the effects persist because the informational content is clear and binding.
Practical example. Two AI teams shipping similar chat systems. Team A chases quarterly demos. They add features, add user growth, add point fixes for each scandal. Over time, their platform learns to excel at one thing: optimizing the metric that feeds its budget. Collective amnesia about harms is rational inside that loop. Team B adds friction at key points—human-in-the-loop for irreversible actions, transparent logs that external critics can query, reward schedules for surfacing misbehavior early. They train less. They remember more. When pressure spikes, A reaches for spectacle; B reaches for memory. Only one of these is fit for a civilization that intends to survive its own tools.
Open methods matter too. If the substrate is real, then it can be inspected. Secrets corrode constraint. Public protocols, testable claims, adversarial collaboration—these are not slogans; they’re the geometry that lets a research culture store truths long enough to orient the next generation. The glamorous alternative is always there: a private stack, an index-boosted release, a compliance theater. It will look efficient right up to the point where the world exacts a price for forgetting. You don’t negotiate with a substrate. You either build with it, or it teaches you again what your predecessors tried to pass down.
Helsinki astrophysicist mentoring students in Kigali. Elias breaks down gravitational-wave news, Rwandan coffee economics, and Pomodoro-method variations. He 3-D-prints telescope parts from recycled PLA and bikes volcanic slopes for cardio.