Start here · Big questions
Why does time have a direction?
We remember the past but not the future. Order tends to fall apart unless effort is applied. Causes come before effects.
Most explanations quietly assume time itself is doing the work — flowing, pushing, or carrying events along. Informational Ontology asks a simpler question:
What if time isn’t fundamental at all?
A different way to think about time
Instead of treating time as a background container, Informational Ontology treats time as something that appears when situations are ordered in an uneven way.
If one situation can only happen after another — but not the other way around — you already have a before and after. You don’t need clocks to get that. You only need asymmetry.
Constraint makes the difference
Some situations are tightly constrained — there are only a few ways they can continue. Other situations are loose and open — there are many more ways forward.
When constraints relax, possibilities multiply. And once there are more ways to go forward than backward, a direction appears naturally.
No force. No flow. Just structure.
Nothing needs to push the universe “forward in time.” Direction emerges because there are simply more ways for constrained situations to open up than to re-form themselves perfectly.
That quiet structural imbalance is enough to explain why time feels directional — and why it’s so hard to reverse.
Want the full explanation?
This page is an introduction. The full version explores the idea in more detail, with examples, analogies, and careful reasoning.