[elzr]

This was surprisingly beautiful. As a geek in programming/computers/information/mathematics, but only a physics admirer from afar, it is very suggestive, even natural, to explain the deepest physical reality in terms of information:

"It was as though particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature."

“What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other,” Lloyd recalls realizing. “The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations.”

“The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.”

[alxndr]

Makes me imagine anthropomorphized variables in a program having discovered the file system and the class definitions that they're instantiated from, but are still trying to figure out what RAM is...

[goldenkey]

I laughed at how clever the analogy is. Time is relative to us as observers, the arrow of time is fundamental I would think.

[trhway]

>"It was as though particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state.

this and all other reformulations of it can be said simply - increasing entropy.