Existence, Explained: Information, Resolution, Change, and the Limits of Totality

This paper proposes a minimal ontology of existence itself. Its central claim is that the entirety of existence is information. Information is used here not in the narrow sense of messages, symbols, stored data, or observer-dependent knowledge, but in the more primitive sense of determinate difference: whatever makes one state distinguishable from another. Because total existence has no outside, it cannot increase by expanding into additional volume, territory, or ontological exterior. Variation must therefore arise internally. The paper argues that existence develops variation through increasing resolution, meaning that finer distinctions become actual within the same totality without anything external being added. All informational variations that can possibly occur are possibilities of existence, but they are not all simultaneously actual. This distinction between possibility and present actuality is necessary for genuine change. The paper defines absolute limitlessness in a deliberately stronger sense than mathematical infinity or unbounded magnitude: an absolutely limitless actuality would lack no possible determination. If nothing possible were excluded from actuality, however, there would be no unrealized alternative into which existence could change. Genuine change therefore entails that every actual state of existence is limited relative to what existence can become. Finally, the paper distinguishes perpetual existence from eternal self-identity. Absolute nonexistence cannot function as one state among states, yet no informational identity need be permanently immune to change. The paper therefore adopts a Total Replacement Principle: for any total state, continued change eventually yields another total state in which none of the information constituting the earlier state remains identically instantiated. Existence is perpetual as actuality without being eternally identical in content. The resulting framework is presented as conceptually prior to the ontology developed in Before Physics and is situated in relation to earlier informational, modal, process, and infinity traditions.