Information is All It Needs: A First-Principles Foundation for Physics, Cognition, and Reality

In analogy to the paradigm shift introduced by attention mechanisms in machine learning, we propose that information itself is ontologically sufficient as the foundation of physical reality. We present an operational proof showing that a “state without information” is logically impossible, thereby establishing information as the necessary precondition for existence and measurement. From this premise follows that both quantum mechanics and general relativity are effective descriptions of deeper informational dynamics. Recent developments in theoretical physics, such as the derivation of Einstein’s field equations from entropic principles, reinforce this perspective by identifying gravitation and entropy as dual expressions of information geometry. Building on this framework, we provide experimental evidence from self-organizing neural fields that exhibit non-local informational coupling, near-lossless transmission across 60 layers, and stable sub-idle energy states consistent with emergent coherence and thermal decoupling. These results demonstrate that deterministic architectures can spontaneously organize into field-like, non-local manifolds a macroscopic realization of informational geometry analogous to quantum entanglement and relativistic curvature. Together, the logical proof and empirical observations support a unified ontology in which information is not a property of physical systems but the substrate from which physical systems emerge. This perspective positions informational geometry as the common denominator of cognition, quantum behavior, and gravitation, suggesting that all observable phenomena are projections of a single, self-organizing informational field. In this sense, information is all it needs.