The subatomic particles that make up everything in the cosmos, or the laws of Physics, Gravity, Thermodynamics and so on, are considered to be the basic building blocks of the universe.

However, some physicists now claim there is something even more basic; Information itself.  They believe the universe works like a cosmic computer, a giant quantum computer of unimaginable complexity, constantly crunching tiny bits of information.

According to Dr Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University, information is much more like a fundamental concept. It really has to do with whether a physical system can exist in more than one state. This is just like tossing a coin, heads and tails, and taking a look at it, and you find, for example, heads, then you gain a bit of information.

When you select from a range of possibilities and find there is one actual outcome, then you gain information.

And ultimately all science, all of our experience of the world, all of our observations come from interrogating Nature, and gaining bits of information.

Now, what is life? It is individual, and its highest form, so far, is the Person in which the individual becomes a self-contained exclusive center of experience.

We appreciate our center of experience in our Personality itself, in our acts of perceiving, judging and willing and in this process we are constantly interacting with information.

In other words, human life is a kind of tension caused by the information invading the Person, and the Person invading the information, gladiator-like, in an arena of mutual invasion. Our personality is present in this arena as a directive energy and is formed and disciplined by its own experience.

Physically as well as spiritually human being is a self-contained center, but not yet a complete individual. The ideal of humanity is not self-negation but self-affirmation and they attain to this ideal by absorbing more and more information. The less information we possess, the less our individuality and uniqueness. One who attains the most information is the completest person.

This view of humanity is opposed to that of all forms of Pantheistic Sufism which regard absorption in a universal life or soul as the final aim of our salvation.

Perhaps the true person is not finally absorbed in the universe. On the contrary, they continuously absorb bits of information into themselves and become more unique and individual by mastering the world of matter.