Consider a conventional MPEG-compressed digital movie. Each frame is composed of discrete pixels. If observers existed inside such a movie, made of pixels and perceiving only pixel-level interactions, what would they observe as their laws of physics?
They would find that their constituent pixels follow mysterious, deterministic, wave-like patterns. To a pixel-physicist, these transitions would appear fundamental. In reality, they are the mathematical output of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) — the compression basis that MPEG codecs use to represent raw pixel data in a maximally compact form.
The parallel with quantum mechanics is direct. The quantum wavefunction distributes probability amplitudes across basis states in Hilbert space exactly as a spatial Fourier transform distributes image information across frequency coefficients. Complex-valued amplitudes are exceptionally efficient at encoding relational information: they produce precisely the spatial smoothness, structural continuity, and predictive regularity that stable observers require.
The hypothesis is therefore: the wave-like behaviour of the microcosm is not a primitive feature of reality but the signature of compressed information as perceived from within. An observer composed of compressed structures will perceive their world as wave-governed for the same reason that a pixel-observer would perceive DCT dynamics: the compression codec is the physics.
The Born rule — the identification of measurement probabilities with squared wavefunction amplitudes — has a natural interpretation under this hypothesis.
Consider a rendering engine producing a sphere with intended shading intensity 0.85, on hardware restricted to discrete outputs of 0.8 or 0.9. The engine employs dithering: distributing 0.8 and 0.9 across adjacent pixels with relative frequencies 0.15 and 0.85 respectively, so that the perceived average matches the target. The discrete output statistics are determined by the continuous target value.
A quantum superposition
is the universe’s implementation of this same principle. The Born rule P = |α|2 is the probability rule of an optimally compressed continuous description rendered through a discrete measurement apparatus. The squaring arises because amplitudes are complex-valued: the information-theoretic weight of a mode is proportional to the power in that mode, which is the squared amplitude.
This does not constitute a derivation of the Born rule — that would require a proof from the spectral complexity axioms alone. It is offered as a motivation: the Born rule is what optimal compression looks like when a continuous description meets a discrete measurement.
Fermions play the role of pixels - real particles, sampled from the wavefunction through Born rule.
Bosons don’t exist as fundamental objects. They are explanatory fictions — the story we tell about why fermions (pixels) move the way they do, when we don’t know they’re being sampled from a wavefunction.
The actual causal chain is:
But an observer who only sees the pixel outputs, not the codec, invents a story:
The boson is the compression residual made into a noun. It’s not wrong — it’s a valid effective description — but it’s not fundamental.
The analogy is exact: in MPEG, macroblocks don’t ”exchange” anything. The DCT coefficients just are what they are. But if one only watched the decoded pixels and tried to explain their correlations without knowing about DCT, one would invent something that looks exactly like boson exchange.
This explains natively why fermions suffer from Pauli exclusion whereas bosons not.