Information as Reality: A Thermodynamic Theory of Life, Mind and Cosmic Acceleration

Abstract: The accelerating expansion of the universe, beginning roughly four billion years ago, represents a thermodynamic discontinuity that classical cosmology cannot explain. This monograph proposes that the anomaly becomes coherent once information is treated as a physical real quantity with thermodynamic and gravitational consequences. Landauer's Principle establishes that information processing carries an irreducible energy cost, implying that information contributes to the stress-energy tensor and therefore to spacetime curvature. Under this framework, the emergence of life marks a phase transition in the universe's informational dynamics. Biological systems are uniquely efficient at paying Landauer's cost, exploring microstates, and generating entropy through structured information processing. The rise of life - and later intelligence - thus represents a shift in the universe's thermodynamic trajectory, coinciding with the onset of cosmic acceleration. The manuscript develops a unified informational architecture linking cosmology, thermodynamics, biology, and consciousness. It argues that life is the universe's most advanced mechanism for dissipating energy and processing information, that quantum-coherent structures in the brain minimize Landauer dissipation and may couple to a non-local field of consciousness, and that micro-scale signatures - from the cosmic web to collective cognition experiments - reflect the same underlying informational geometry. The resulting framework reframes life, intelligence, and consciousness not as anomalies but as natural consequences of the universe's evolution toward greater informational and entropic capacity. It suggests that cosmic acceleration is a macroscopic response to the rise of structured information processing and offers testable predictions linking informational complexity to curvature. “This work is also archived at Zenodo under DOI: 10.5281/zenado.18856554A parallel deposit exists at Figshare under doi.org/10.6084/m9figshare.31558090A HAL deposit is pending and will be linked upon approval.This monograph is part of an emerging Open Science project aimed at collaboratively refining a unified ontology of reality.License: CC BY‑SA 4.0.”