Topic summary
Pancomputationalism
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Digital physics.
Precursors of pancomputationalism
The idea that number or structure is ontologically basic has Pythagorean antecedents, and Leibniz's work on binary arithmetic and a universal calculus is frequently cited as an ancestor. The more direct scientific lineage runs through the thermodynamic treatment of information: Leó Szilárd's 1929 analysis of Maxwell's demon, Claude Shannon's information theory, and Rolf Landauer's demonstration that logically irreversible operations carry an unavoidable thermodynamic cost, summarised in his dictum that information is physical.