From It to Bit to Chit: Toward a Layered Ontology of Reality and Consciousness

Abstract

This article develops an original philosophical framework for thinking about the relation among physical reality, information, virtuality, and consciousness. It begins from John Wheeler’s celebrated formulation “it from bit” and David J. Chalmers’s extension of the idea into his account of virtual realism in Reality+ (2022). Chalmers argues that virtual objects and environments can be genuinely real when they are appropriately constituted by digital processes. Yet an informational or computational account of reality does not by itself settle the question of phenomenal consciousness. The article therefore proposes a further conceptual movement from “bit” to “chit”: from informational structure to lived experience. The expression “It from Bit from Chit” is introduced not as an established scientific doctrine, nor as a claim that Chalmers, Wheeler, or Advaita Vedānta already endorse such a formula, but as a heuristic for identifying an unresolved ontological and explanatory transition. Drawing on Chalmers’s hard-problem argument, Zahavi’s phenomenological account of intentionality and first-personal givenness, and selected Advaita Vedānta resources, the article argues for a layered ontology in which physical realization, informational organization, and phenomenal manifestation are distinguishable but related dimensions. The central claim is modest but significant: information may explain how a system is organized, processed, and functionally related to an environment without thereby explaining why there is experience for the system at all. The proposed framework therefore does not replace physical or informational explanation; it asks whether such explanations are phenomenologically complete. The paper concludes that “It from Bit from Chit” is best understood as a research programme for investigating whether consciousness should be treated merely as an outcome to be explained by informational organization or as a fundamental dimension that any complete ontology of reality must accommodate.