  The intriguing suggestion of Tegmark (1996) that the universe--contrary to
all our experiences and expectations--contains only a small amount of
information due to an extremely high degree of internal symmetry is critically
examined. It is shown that there are several physical processes, notably
Hawking evaporation of black holes and non-zero decoherence time effects
described by Plaga, as well as thought experiments of Deutsch and Tegmark
himself, which can be construed as arguments against the low-information
universe hypothesis. In addition, an extreme form of physical reductionism is
entailed by this hypothesis, and therefore any possible argumentation against
such reductionism would count against it either. Some ramifications for both
quantum mechanics and cosmology are briefly discussed.
