Whatever came before the Big Bang so when we talk about and emphasize that it’s not physical we have support for this by noting that whatever came before the Big Bang was something different we don’t even need to define it just like information itself we can keep it ineffable other than to say it was definitely different than the than our physical universe and then tie that into You know millennia of human thought about cyclicality and rebirth and death all of these things support the fundamental tenants of an informational universe and hence information Dynamics the way in which those things interact and change for example contrast obviously has strong support in taoism and the concept of yin and Yang they are both one and yet to appreciate one requires the contrast of the other these Central tenets that exist far before our current westernized thinking and so must be respected for having survived not dismissed out of hand as being pseudoscience or metaphysics because in fact all science is philosophy. make sure to be clear that universal information is inferred from its effects on our physical universe and from the logic of reason and consciousness however we define that which we can get to later. There’s definitely a feedback loop or self-referential cycle here that is important as we proceed with the fundamentals The primitives and then derivatives which very much addresses consciousness. So any references to reality or Universe do not suppose unless explicitly stated only our physical universe whether or not we can conceive of anything beyond our physical universe is irrelevant to this conversation