There has always been only one substance

There has always been only one substance. It has spent 13.8 billion years learning what to do with itself. That substance is information. And progress … every step from the first chemical bond to the latest scientific revolution … is the process by which information accumulates causal sovereignty over matter and energy.

Six phases separate raw bits from self-improving knowledge. Five of them happened. The sixth is happening now.

For 10 billion years, the leverage was nearly flat. Atoms formed. Stars burned. Nothing in the universe could yet do anything with information except propagate it.

Then, in the last 0.0002 of cosmic time … life, minds, knowledge, AI. The curve turned vertical.

We are inside the steepest moment of that curve. Not the next one. This one.

The Big Bang was the boot sequence. Atoms were the assembly language. Life was the operating system. Minds were the application layer. Knowledge is the moment the program looked at its own source code.

Phase 6 is the moment it started editing itself.

Build what entropy cannot undo.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn with an attached feed document.

@misc{anderson_2026_there_has_always_been_only_one_substance,
  author = {Jed Anderson},
  title  = {There has always been only one substance},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://jedanderson.org/posts/there-has-always-been-only-one-substance},
  note   = {Accessed: 2026-05-13}
}

Anderson, J. (2026). There has always been only one substance. Retrieved from https://jedanderson.org/posts/there-has-always-been-only-one-substance

Anderson, Jed. "There has always been only one substance." Jed Anderson, May 13, 2026, https://jedanderson.org/posts/there-has-always-been-only-one-substance.