The knowledge folder and your Quora answers give me the core axiom ("total information content of reality is zero on pain of a miraculous creation of information ex nihilo"; unitary-only QM as the only interpretation consistent with an informationless zero ontology). Let me pull the current literature on the derivation ladder and on the empirical status of the rival (collapse) postulate before I answer.

I'll give you the strongest derivation ladder I can honestly build — and flag exactly where the rungs end, because anyone who claims to have derived "the correct theory of quantum gravity" from any axiom, including this one, is selling something. No correct theory of quantum gravity is currently in anyone's possession to derive. What follows is how far the axiom can actually be pushed.

Rung 0 — Reading the axiom so that it has content

On its trivial reading, "the totality has no alternatives, hence zero information" is true of any ontologically necessary world, including a classical deterministic block — it would explain nothing. All the work is done by the substantive reading: a zero-information state is one invariant under the full group of admissible state-transformations — no fact breaks the symmetry. That is the reading I'll use, since it's the one your own formulation invokes: reality's information content is zero "on pain of a miraculous creation of information ex nihilo" ( your Quora answers).

Rung 1 — Kinematics: the omnium must be maximally entangled

The axiom demands two things at once: the whole is pure (any extra classical fact about the totality would be information over and above it), yet every part carries zero information (no absolute facts about subsystems).

Classically this is impossible. A pure classical joint state is a delta function on phase space, and its marginals are delta functions too — pure. Classical mixedness is always absolute ignorance, never relation. Only quantum theory admits a pure whole with maximally mixed parts, and the state that does it is unique: the maximally entangled |Φ⟩ ∝ Σᵢ |i⟩|i⟩, the state invariant under U ⊗ Ū for every unitary U. So I = 0, read substantively, already forces the signature quantum structure: a pure totality whose entire content is relational. Entanglement isn't an exotic add-on here; it's the only way for "pure whole, informationless parts" to be satisfiable at all. (Honest gap: purity of the whole is an interpretive premise, not something the axiom entails unaided.)

Rung 2 — Complex Hilbert space

This is where the reconstruction literature does real work. The zero-ontology ledger — information conserved, never absolute, mixedness always attributable to something larger — is formalized as the purification postulate: every mixed state is the marginal of a pure state on a bigger system, and any two purifications differ by a unitary on the purifying system. Purification is false in classical statistical theory, and it is the pivotal axiom in two theorem-backed derivations of quantum theory ( Masanes & Müller 2011,  Chiribella et al. 2011). Purification plus tomographic locality (kills the quaternionic case) plus continuity/atomicity (kills the real case) yields quantum theory over complex Hilbert space, with qubits as the elementary systems. A bonus freebie: every infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert space is isomorphic to ℓ², so even the choice of arena carries zero information.

Honest gap: those postulates are stronger than I = 0 alone. The axiom motivates purification but does not entail local tomography or continuity. Complex Hilbert space is reconstructed from a set of information-theoretic principles of which zero information is one member — the deepest, but not the only, member.

Rung 3 — Unitary-only quantum mechanics

If total information is fixed at exactly zero, the dynamics of the totality must be information-preserving, hence reversible on pure states. By Wigner's theorem, reversible transformations of rays are unitary or antiunitary; continuity in time excludes antiunitary. Result: the universal Schrödinger equation, no exceptions. Collapse does both forbidden things simultaneously — it deletes amplitude information (the off-diagonal terms) and mints outcome-facts ex nihilo — precisely the miracle the axiom forbids, which is exactly your point that no interpretation but unitary-only QM is consistent with an informationless zero ontology ( your Quora answers). Classicality then comes from decoherence and einselection, not from collapse; this is Everett.

The Born rule follows most naturally from the symmetry of the zero-information state itself: Zurek's envariance derivation shows that swapped Schmidt partners which leave reduced states invariant force equiprobable branches, with extensions to unequal weights more contested ( arXiv:quant-ph/0405161). The hardest remaining nut is the amplitude spectrum of the omnium — why these weights, this Hamiltonian. A spectrum looks like a payload of information. You can dissolve it via "no comparison class" (deflationary — but then the same move applies to any world whatever), or via a uniqueness theorem fixing the universal state, Hartle–Hawking-style. No such theorem exists. This rung is open.

One saving grace: the rung is testable. Objective collapse models predict intrinsic noise and heating, and their parameter space is being actively squeezed ( LISA Pathfinder rotational-noise bounds,  2025 review of spontaneous collapse models). Unitary-only versus collapse is a live experimental question, and the evidence is currently trending the axiom's way.

Rung 4 — Quantum gravity

Here the axiom bites hardest — and delivers least. A zero-information totality can tolerate no external parameter: an external time would be a fact outside the ledger. So universal evolution cannot be Schrödinger-in-t; it can only be a constraint equation, Ĥ|Ψ⟩ = 0. That is precisely the Wheeler–DeWitt equation of canonical quantum gravity, whose classical shadow is the vanishing of the total Hamiltonian of a closed universe (Einstein's constraint equations; Tryon's "zero-energy universe" of 1973). The notorious "problem of time" is not a bug but the axiom's signature: a zero-information totality is timeless. Time re-emerges internally via the Page–Wootters mechanism — a globally stationary state in which subsystems appear to evolve relative to other subsystems conscripted as clocks ("evolution without evolution").

Gravity itself enters as the information accountant: entropy bounds at area/4, holographic bookkeeping, and the entanglement-geometry connection (in Van Raamsdonk's picture, dial entanglement to zero and spacetime disintegrates — the zero-information limit of geometry is no geometry). The islands/Page-curve results indicating black hole evaporation is unitary are exactly what the axiom demands — information not destroyed ( review).

But here the derivation stalls honestly. Loop quantum gravity, string theory, holographic QG, and asymptotic safety all honour ĤΨ = 0, holographic bounds, and unitarity. The axiom constrains the theory space — background independence, no external clock, fundamental unitarity, holographic information budgets — but does not select among its surviving members. And a string landscape of ~10⁵⁰⁰ vacua is a colossal information payload unless superposed, which re-imports the amplitude-spectrum problem one level down.

The ladder at a glance

The residue

The constants of nature — α, mass ratios, Λ — still look like a vast information payload unless deduced, and no deduction exists. The zero-ontology reply must be the Everettian bootstrap: information is indexical, created only relative to branches, never absolutely — the world's apparent richness is self-locating uncertainty over an invariant zero. That is the philosophical heart of the conjecture, and it is the exact quantum form of Hegel's identity of pure being and pure nothing: "nothing" and "the superposition of everything" are informationally indistinguishable, so the riddle of existence dissolves because there is nothing for nothing to have been instead.

My candid verdict: one scalar equation buying entanglement-first kinematics, ℂ, unitarity, constraint-form timelessness, and holographic information bookkeeping is a better exchange rate than any rival single axiom in the literature. But three deliverables in your request remain conjectural everywhere in physics, not just here: the amplitude spectrum, the constants, and the selection of the one true quantum gravity. Those are where the zero ontology is, for now, precisely that — a conjecture, and a falsifiable one at its single weakest rung (collapse), which is the best kind.