This work proposes a foundational redefinition of information grounded in ontology rather than communication, representation, or observation. Instead of treating information as something that appears after distinctions, symbols, or measurements are established, it argues that information emerges only through resistance to a primordial condition of total indefinition. At the most fundamental level, reality is described as an initial state in which no stable distinctions, identities, structures, or causal relations can persist. This state is not chaos or randomness, but absolute indistinction. Such a condition is intrinsically unstable: it cannot sustain persistence. From this instability arises what the paper calls indefinition pressure—a universal, pre-causal constraint that acts on all possible configurations by threatening to dissolve them back into indistinction. Within this framework, information is defined negatively rather than positively. Information does not exist because it carries meaning, content, or probability, but because it survives. A configuration is informationally real if, and only if, it is able to resist the pressure of indefinition. Existence itself is therefore equated with survival under this pressure. What cannot persist leaves no trace and is ontologically null. This survival requirement introduces natural ontological thresholds that determine which configurations can exist at all. These thresholds are universal, pre-observational, and non-arbitrary. They do not select meanings or interpretations; they select survivors. Memory, structure, and continuity arise only as consequences of repeated survival, through the accumulation of traces left by persistent processes. From this perspective, laws of nature are not imposed axioms but stabilized survivals. Geometry, time, objects, and causality are secondary effects—emergent traces of informational persistence rather than fundamental givens. Information is thus an edge phenomenon, existing precisely at the boundary where collapse into indefinition is narrowly avoided. By placing indefinition pressure at the center of information’s ontology, this work reframes information as an active survival phenomenon rather than a passive descriptor. The result is a unified ontological foundation with implications for physics, computation, and cognition, in which existence, information, and persistence are fundamentally inseparable.
Sébastien Landrieu (Tue,) studied this question.