Most physicalists used to subscribe to some version of the stuff and structure ontology. There is stuff, and stuff is structured, but structure is not more stuff. The really hot physicists these days dispense with the stuff, and manage with just structure. So worse than information is physical, they claim that physicality is informational. — unenlightened

I think that this is the issue, in a nutshell. The structure of things, the relationships between things, is commonly taken to be the "information". So in Wayfarer's example, the number of masts, the speed of the ship, etc.. These are all properties of the physical world, existing relationships which are observed and interpreted as information.

The problem arises when, as you describe, we assume structure, relationships between things, without those things being there. This is a real problem because we can build structures of relationships, assuming that these structures are somehow real, or even physical, without any proof that any physical objects could actually exist in these relationships. So there are massive informational structures, produced from mathematical theories, which are used to explain physical existence, which are completely imaginary. Yes they do explain certain aspects of physical existence, so they are valid and grounded in that sense, but the informational structures are completely imaginary, and claimed by some, to have real physical existence, simply because they accurately predict certain physical occurrences.

The universe is fundamentally composed of data, understood as dedomena, patterns or fields of differences, instead of matter or energy, with material objects as a complex secondary manifestation. — Galuchat

Yes, this is exactly the point.

I think Wittgenstein's Blue Book is a good starting point of investigation of this question, where he begins to address the problem of the location of meaning, and starts to overcome his representationalism by beginning to formulate a negative position towards private language with a more holistic and pragmatic understanding of meaning as use as an irreducible trinity of Intuition, Language and Physical interaction.

- Language isn't reducible to Intuition (contra Intuitionism)
- Intuition isn't reducible to Language (contra Formalism)
- Physics isn't reducible to Language and Intuition (contra Idealism)
- Intuition isn't reducible to Physics and Language (contra Materialism)
- Language isn't reducible to Physics and Intuition (contra Representationalism)

Floridi defines information as well-formed data which is meaningful. Are your viewpoints amenable to this definition?

"The really hot physicists these days dispense with the stuff, and manage with just structure. So worse than information is physical, they claim that physicality is informational." — unenlightened


Correct.
John Archibald Wheeler writes:
“It from bit”. Otherwise put, every “it” every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself derives its function, its meaning, its very existence (even if in some contexts indirectly) from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. “It from bit” symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom a very deep bottom, in most instances an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

Wheeler, J.A.: Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information. In: Zureck, W.H. (ed.). Addison Wesley, Redwood City (1990).

But instead of worse, even better: information can be physical and/or psychophysical. — Galuchat

This is somehow amusing to me. In terms I think even preadolescent kids might understand, it all amount to: who has the metaphysical rights to the ontology portrayed in the movie “The Matrix” (sans the part of being unplugged from the Matrix)? The physicalists or the non-physicalists?

Which to me necessitates the question: What’s the difference!

Yet this latter question is to me more important that it may at first seem. What then are the tacitly maintained differences between neo-physicalism and non-physicalist approaches to the same basic understanding of ontology as information rather than as stuff? It may not be that easy to answer … but I’m currently betting that the physicalists will uphold that death leads to the nonbeing of awareness, whereas the non-physicalists will uphold otherwise. Any other differences?

[BTW, while I can enjoy the movie as a movie, I don’t look upon it as a prophetic body of bits as to what ontology really is. To state the obvious, the movie series is not a thought-out philosophy but only a modern mythos.]

Concept - Transmission - Transmission is physical, concept not. No? — MikeL

If a concept is a pattern that is transmitted how can the transmission be physical but not the pattern?

Floridi defines information as well-formed data which is meaningful. — Galuchat

This is only understood after the fact. Information to Sherlock Holmes' mind is due to the skill developed to discern. It only becomes information once the mind had grasped something that it had found meaningful. Other minds may differ. Information is not an intrinsic property and well-formed has no meaning outside of an individual mind that perceives.

It is the mind that forms and creates information as memory.

Apart from what the messages are about (ships, distance), is there anything other than their representations (inscriptions, morse) and their mental renditions (sentry, officer)?

The learned patterns that are associated with other learned patterns.

Floridi defines information as well-formed data which is meaningful. Are your viewpoints amenable to this definition? — Galuchat

yes, and of course the general question of what meaning is then needs dissolving into its vast family of uses without veering into the rocks of any particular global theory, picture, ism or formalism.

Wittgenstein of course, was in some sense a thorough-going nominalist, finitist and like Quine rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction and the closely related idea that logic could be true by convention. From this perspective it is much easier to see that data, together with rules they are often said to stand for, are merely a finite bunch of signs we use for a purpose, without us possessing a precise definition of what our signs represent, or for that matter what our finite "rules of inference" justify us to conclude.

Once of the central idea of the Philosophical Investigations was that rules are only rough-cut normative principles relating to human culture and understanding, and that they are not hidden and infinitely precise transcendental platonic entities operating at a distance in the background outside of the mind and of human culture.

I believe it was for that reason that Wittgenstein used Chess in the Philosophical Investigations as his example for explaining the normative social dimension of rules, as opposed to the example of computing machines where the temptation towards mind-independent and context-free Platonism about rule-following is much stronger.

As for the latter example, Wittgenstein elsewhere summed up the Church-Turing Thesis as

"Turing machines, these machines are humans who calculate"

For example, it would make sense to attribute conscious rule-following to a robot or a chimpanzee if the robot or chimpanzee could gesture to us a justification of their behaviour in terms of a rule that they give as a normative-principle pertaining to their action, in the same way we would attribute conscious rule-following to a mathematics pupil only if he could explain to us why he continued the series the way he did.

But for Wittgenstein it would be nonsensical to attribute consciousness or rather, "intrinsic meaning" to a simulation of the human brain on belief that the simulation was intrinsically implementing the same rules as the brain, for the same reason as before; that for Wittgenstein rules are an essentially normative notion rather than a mechanical notion. For Human brains aren't really "following rules mechanically" except in the sense of a narrative we conjure up for the descriptive purposes of heuristic and approximate empirical understanding of their behaviour, for computer simulation of them, for causal explanation and so on.

Perhaps we could say: we can judge a system to be mechanically following a rule if we can accurately predict its behaviour on the basis of a rule that we have consciously *invented* which describes it's behaviour. But we cannot say that we *discover* pre-existing rules that are lurking within "essentially mechanical" systems of nature, for that leads to a viciously circular regress about what "mechanically following a rule" means.

Isn't DNA physical information?

Some solution attempts to Maxwell's Demon rely on a mathematical relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy. So there's some precedent for using information as a physical concept.

This is somehow amusing to me. In terms I think even preadolescent kids might understand, it all amount to: who has the metaphysical rights to the ontology portrayed in the movie “The Matrix” (sans the part of being unplugged from the Matrix)? The physicalists or the non-physicalists? — javra

Hmm. It is ironic that a lot of you guys are reacting in horror at physicists who might take it literally that reality is just a pattern of information. It is after all just a modern version of idealism. You have physicists who are denying materialism and saying things are pure information. Reality is even observer created if you go to the quantum extreme.

So here we have science prepared to talk openly about a concrete idealist ontology. And everyone gasps in shock. No they must be wrong. Matter is obviously real. The Matrix could only be a simulation hanging off an electrical plug.

Apart from what the messages are about (ships, distance), is there anything other than their representations (inscriptions, morse) and their mental renditions (sentry, officer)? — jorndoe

No - but there doesn't need to be, for the point to be made, which is that the physical form and the medium in which the information is transmitted can be entirely changed, but the meaning remain the same. How, therefore, could the 'meaning of the information' be physical?

Isn't DNA physical information? — Bitter Crank

The analogy of letters and their meaning holds here too, doesn't it?

The genetic code is the best example we have of the power of information. Some...have wondered if the DNA-RNA-protein sequence truly involves information in the deep sense. It might be argued that it is simply a dynamic process, sort of like a row of dominoes in which each one tips the next.

However, a series of experiments has blown any such notion away. It turns out that genes can embody high level abstractions such as “do what it takes to form an eye.” Pluck out the Eyes Absent gene from a mouse and insert it into the genome of a fruitfly whose Eyeless gene is missing, and you get a fruitfly with eyes. ¹ Not mouse eyes, mind you, but fruitfly eyes, which are built along totally different lines. A mouse eye, like yours or mine, has a single lens which focuses light on the retina. A fruitfly has a compound eye, made up of thousands of lenses in tubes, like a group of tightly packed telescopes. About the only thing the eyes have in common are that they are for seeing.

What does this tell us? Information, organized into concepts, is demonstrably 'out there' in the world, and without violating the laws of physics it can guide processes as they unfold. As in the genes, so in the mind. — Clay Farris Naff

1. Nancy M. Bonini, Quang T. Bui, Gladys L. Gray-Board and John M. Warrick, “The Drosophila eyes absent gene directs ectopic eye formation in a pathway conserved between flies and vertebrates,” Development (1997) 124, 4819-4826; quoted in A Fabulous Evolutionary Defense of Dualism.

This has many interesting implications. It is presented in the context of an 'evolutionary argument for dualism'.

there's some precedent for using information as a physical concept. — fdrake

That seems true, but also not exactly the point of the OP.

Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day ~ Norbert Weiner

Wiener, N.: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge (1961) — Galuchat

I have encountered that quotation previously, but haven't studied cybernetics, and am hesitant to comment on it. But I have a feeling that this kind of understanding has lead to the positing of 'information' as a third category, alongside 'matter' and 'energy', as one of the fundamental constituents of nature. It is hoped thereby to add a further item in the catalog of 'fundamental constituents' which will enable naturalism to proceed on the basis that the objects of its analysis are simple and intelligible.

But it begs the question: 'what 'information'? Whereas 'the atom' has a unitary meaning - an atom being an indivisible material unit; as does energy, being 'the capacity to to work' - I can't see how 'information' can be understood as something which is metaphysically simple. 'Information' is a polyvalent concept - it has many meanings. There are many types of information and it serves different purposes in different contexts.

So to narrow the terms of reference somewhat, the question I'm posing in the OP is, what is it that performs the transformation of meaning between different media and different languages? I presume that the answer to that is that this is a function of rational intelligence. So I am saying, this itself is not something physical. Ergo, I am arguing for some species of dualism, the separation of information from its material representation, which I think has interesting philosophical implications.

who has the metaphysical rights to the ontology portrayed in the movie “The Matrix” (sans the part of being unplugged from the Matrix)? — javra

I went to see Matrix with my kids. I got really annoyed at the red pill/blue pill scene - I thought it was frankly sacrilege. Why? Because it is a metaphor for something profoundly important, which, I thought, had been seized upon by pulp-fiction hustlers to make a buck. Although it's interesting that films like Matrix, Inception, etc, are so popular, I think they speak to an intuition we all have about the possibility of the world being a grand illusion.

Hmm. It is ironic that a lot of you guys are reacting in horror at physicists who might take it literally that reality is just a pattern of information. It is after all just a modern version of idealism. You have physicists who are denying materialism and saying things are pure information. Reality is even observer created if you go to the quantum extreme.

So here we have science prepared to talk openly about a concrete idealist ontology. And everyone gasps in shock. No they must be wrong. Matter is obviously real. The Matrix could only be a simulation hanging off an electrical plug. — apokrisis

You appear to confuse humorously sardonic remarks with horror. Hell, bring these new interpretations of information on!

Who knows, given enough information interpretation, maybe that ancient notion of the “the One” might itself come to be interpreted as a core component of physicalism. Why not again? (this gets to that other, non-rhetorical, question I posed in relation to neo-physicalism v. non-physicalism: “what’s the difference?”)

I went to see Matrix with my kids. I got really annoyed at the red pill/blue pill scene - I thought it was frankly sacrilege. Why? Because it is a metaphor for something profoundly important, which, I thought, had been seized upon by pulp-fiction hustlers to make a buck. — Wayfarer

Very true. The two things that got to me most, personally, was their interpretations of Goddess and God and their Hollywood minded favoring of personal love between two beings over and above the preservation of the whole world’s integrity (the I’ll say “to hell with the health of humanity at large” so as to save your individual precious life, dear … not quite what the ideals of selflessness are about, as I so far see things anyway).

Although it's interesting that films like Matrix, Inception, etc, are so popular, I think they speak to an intuition we all have about the possibility of the world being a grand illusion. — Wayfarer

I too can’t deny the impact the fairytale story has had on the general public consciousness in terms of possible interpretations of reality. (I don’t see a whole lot of philosophical merit to Inception, though.)

I can't see how 'information' can be understood as something which is metaphysically simple. — Wayfarer

Probabaly the best foundational definition of information - from Bateson and cybernetics - is that it is a difference that makes a difference. So meaningfulness in a nutshell.

Then to quantify such a quality, you need to be able to measure that in terms of what it is not. You need a way of also counting the differences that don't make a difference. You need a metric of the meaningless.

Hence the close connection with physical entropy modelling. You need to be able to count the total number of possible material bits - all the differences that could have been signal rather than noise - so as then to be able to give a value to what turns out to be signal, and not noise.

This is what science is so good at. Taking a basic metaphysical intuition and deriving a system of measurement that then makes the ontological commitments exact and testable. A way of thinking becomes fully worked out.

You are very focused on the issue of "where has meaning gone?". You eavesdrop on the scientists - a librarian's account! - and say clearly they are talking about meaningless bits. They are measuring physical noise and not conceptual knowlege or semantic facts.

But what science is doing is defining difference itself as the baseline for then measuring differences that make a difference.

Once you have Boltzmann entropy, then you have a secure basis for more meaningful thermodynamic models - like dissipative structures which are negentropic and serving a purpose.

Once you have Shannon information, you can then build theories of meaning based on more sophisticated metrics like mutual information or free energy reduction.

Science ain't dumb. It knows that information theory isn't a theory of meaning. It is about establishing a secure foundation for that by being able to measure what is instead the meaningless. Once you have cleared the ground, the real work can begin.

Yeah sorry. The comment was directed at the OP. Your Matrix remark highlighted for me that the literal view is the modern version of idealism.

As to death and the Matrix, a problem literal informatics would seem to have is that it undermines conservation principles. Physicists would want an it from bit Universe in which the information is a conserved quantity. So the death of a character would have to be a disassembly of bits which could always be rearranged - resurrected in theory.

In the end, informational bits or material bits, the bigger ontological issues remain the same. More evidence of why there is an essential equivalence. Idealism always ends up having to "work" just like physicalism. We see that with panpsychism for instance.

Another irony here.

I tend to view this question in terms of a Tractarian ontology of facts, not things.

Namely, that information is the description of the arrangements of particles or 'things'. Meaning is derived from the sum total of the arrangement of 'things' in space, which are facts.

If one wants to take a metaphysical view on the state of affairs of these facts in logical space, then a reference to 'the map is not the territory' is apt. Namely, that information itself is devoid of meaning, and meaning is derived from modeling these states of affairs in logical space giving rise to 'facts' not 'things'.

Namely, that information is the description of the arrangements of particles or 'things'. Meaning is derived from the sum total of the arrangement of 'things' in space, which are facts. — Posty McPostface

So it is an ontology of relata rather than things. That is why the talk is of counting degrees of freedom instead of particles or things.

So it is an ontology of relata rather than things. — apokrisis

What do you mean by that? Yes, the relation of things in logical space gives rise to facts, which is only made possible by a consciouss observer or even an observer from within the system of relations of things and thus facts.

That is why the talk is of counting degrees of freedom instead of particles or things. — apokrisis

Well, on a more fundamental level, the discussion cannot be made without observation of the state of affairs, which is puzzling, and could perhaps elucidate that there is some assumption of metaphysical entailed in interpreting information, facts. Obviously, epiphenomena seem metaphysical (from within the system or state space or logical space itself); but, are rather just emergent properties of the relations between things and not facts. So, in essence, we seem to be talking about epiphenomena.

In other words, traits or things cannot be modeled; but, rather only observed.

Ditto.

Physicists would want an it from bit Universe in which the information is a conserved quantity. — apokrisis

One relevant issue that I find interest in is the ontic possibility of novel information creation and information erasure. As it happens, there are some physicists who uphold the possibility that information itself might be both created and erased within Black Hole gravitational singularities (to be clear, non-allegorically). I know it’s speculative, and for the sake of disclosure my current interest in these branches of physics is solely limited to what I glimpse from documentaries on the topic.

All the same, I have an affinity toward this roundabout interpretation of information: one where it is ontically possible--given the proper events--for information to be created and erased.

Nothing to debate here on my part. Just curious to hear if you’ve taken this possibility of information creation/deletion into account in any way.

Some solution attempts to Maxwell's Demon rely on a mathematical relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy. So there's some precedent for using information as a physical concept. — fdrake

That seems true, but also not exactly the point of the OP. — Wayfarer

?

It's the central test case. If you can gather information about the state of a system without spending free energy to record that information (or to reset your sensor/doorkeeper) then you can do work for free, you can have perpetual motion. This leads directly to Landauer's claim.

what is it that performs the transformation of meaning between different media and different languages? I presume that the answer to that is that this is a function of rational intelligence. — Wayfarer

When a squirrel makes that "cat near my tree" sound, I don't think we need to call that rationality. It's involuntary, but it is exactly the kind of transformation we're talking about. (I'd rather talk about thermostats, but everyone will want to talk about the thermostat designer instead.)

Yes, the relation of things in logical space gives rise to facts, — Posty McPostface

The shift is from things to relations. The things drop out of the picture to leave only the relations.

So it is a shift from material cause thinking to formal cause thinking, which reflects the reality that Reality boils down to its organisation, its structure.

Hence ontic structural realism as the new metaphysical bandwagon - the response to the information theoretical turn in physics.

Of course that then makes "things" or "materiality" rather mysterious. The materialists will cry in reply, the existence of relations surely implies the existence of things to be related? The same old, same old.

But really, what we can be sure of is the existence of patterns or structures. The nature of "the material" in fact is ineffable, beyond our reach.

The ironies keep compounding here. Physics is moving towards a more rigorous epistemology and that flushes out the lingering materialism in most folk's thinking. The old habit that can't be broke.

So, in essence, we seem to be talking about epiphenomena. — Posty McPostface

No. The point is that phenomena are the only thing we can talk about. We have to start from experience itself (which is prior even to a mind~world distinction - the debate between the idealists and realists).

Materialism - as reductionist atomism - made all reality a composite of individuated "thingness". Substantial being was made basic. Relations then became accidental. Form and purpose were not real as causes.

As the basis of physics theories. that was great up until quantum mechanics and general relativity. Then it started to get very sticky as the basic holistic contextuality of nature became grimly apparent.

Now physics has switched over to a more idealist mode of description - information. It no longer makes any real presumptions about the nature of matter. Instead it freely speculates about the "fundamental constituents" in terms of pure forms. Particles could be vibrating strings, or excitations in the geometry of a network, or knots in spacetime dimensionality.

In other words, physics now seeks the pure calculus of relata. A particle isn't a material string. It is instead the symmetries that a string can encode which are now the basis of the modelling of reality.

So for a long time, pattern, form, purpose, universals - all these things were treated as epiphenomenal. But now we are explaining reality in terms of these phenomena - patterns we perceive and can understand "directly".

If reality is about knot theory, or string theory, or braid theory, we can see directly the reasons for the patterns we experience. It is the generic form involved that explains things. We no longer have to invoke some mysterious "uncuttable material constituent particle".

The "rot" started with quantum mechanics. Is reality about particles or waves, or even wavicles, or wave packets? Physics says all we can really know is what we see. Sometimes reality has the pattern that we would derive from the idea of a particle, sometimes that derived from the idea of a wave.

So science is treated by Wayfarer especially as guilty of arch-materialism. He is always searching for examples of scientists who can best confirm that opinion.

And yet here with the turn to information theoretic physics, we have science that is actually now more phenomenological, more idealistic. Thermodynamics even endorses teleology now that it has advanced to talk about the Cosmos as a dissipative structure (see Layzer).

No. The point is that phenomena are the only thing we can talk about. We have to start from experience itself (which is prior even to a mind~world distinction - the debate between the idealists and realists). — apokrisis

Yeah, and that's the point of the Tractatus. Whereof one cannot speak (say epiphenomena, ethics, love, traits, qualities, even qualia) thereof things must be shown or observed. You seem to be describing what phenomena are or what counts as phenomena and epiphenomena if ever a strict definition can be concluded, I'm merely talking about the difference between phenomena and epiphenomena existing and the difference in logical terms between the two which this thread seems to be about.

One relevant issue that I find interest in is the ontic possibility of novel information creation and information erasure. As it happens, there are some physicists who uphold the possibility that information itself might be both created and erased within Black Hole gravitational singularities (to be clear, non-allegorically). — javra

Landauer was the one who made the information erasure point. Computation is physical because it doesn't have to cost energy to create information. But an entropic price has to be paid to erase it. That is a fundamental constraint which shows information and matter are connected in a deep fashion. Even a Matrix simulation can't be a perpetual motion machine as the laws of thermodynamics apply.

Then black holes are about information loss - so only erasure in being lost over an event horizon. With black holes, we seemed to have a violation of conservation principles. But then the solution was found in the holographic principle. The information can be considered as physically encoded on a surface ... the event horizon. And so it can be recovered ... re-radiated in scrambled fashion, but nevertheless, returned.

Some really crazy ideas turned out to have deeply meaningful consequences. They made predictions which we can observe.

So - so far - conservation of information is proving a powerful principle, just as conservation of matter was.

But then where does that leave spontaneity, creativity, novelty? Is this ontic structural realism the new determinism? Or is material cause - the ineffable thingness that is missing from the formal account - now the pure indeterminacy, the pure uncertainty, the pure notion of "an action", that lurks just out of sight of the phenomenology?

Is material cause now the ghost in physics's formal machinery?

When a squirrel makes that "cat near my tree" sound, I don't think we need to call that rationality. It's involuntary, but it is exactly the kind of transformation we're talking about. (I'd rather talk about thermostats, but everyone will want to talk about the thermostat designer instead.) — Srap Tasmaner

Nevertheless, as to the duality between some X which is interpreting information and the information itself: Is the squirrel here deemed an inanimate interpreter? Is the thermometer deemed an animate interpreter? Or, else, is there somehow deemed to be no meaningful difference between animate givens and inanimate givens?

All three questions at the very least appear to address nonsensical metaphysical positions.

This just touched upon issue gets into the metaphysical issues of causal agency: what can be said to be endowed with it and what cannot. If my memory serves me right, this is similar enough to somebody’s comment about “that which breath’s life into the maths”. (I don’t recall who said this or in what context.)

Point being: To do away with the underlying duality between some X which is interpreting (often termed conscious agency) and the information thus interpreted so far seems to me nonsensical. And it is this metaphysical duality which is meaningfully addressed by the terms “animate” and “inanimate”.

How does one logically do away with the metaphysical need for the just addressed duality?*

*But, please note that mind as information is itself strictly information, and not the agency-endowed X(s) which is engaged in the activity of interpretation: for example, the unconscious mind which brings about memories at proper times might itself be replete with causal agency or agencies, but a memory itself as information will not of itself be a causal agency (rather, it will be information interpreted by some agency X). Hence the duality just mentioned will not be that of a Cartesian dualism between mind and body—both of which are strictly information (when addressed as givens devoid of causal agency).

Then black holes are about information loss - so only erasure in being lost over an event horizon. — apokrisis

The hypothesis I learned of is of a polar explosion of information which thereby flattens galactic stars into their common disk shape form. But again, I'm not in a position to debate the matter.

But then where does that leave spontaneity, creativity, novelty? Is this ontic structural realism the new determinism? Or is material cause - the ineffable thingness that is missing from the formal account - now the pure indeterminacy, the pure uncertainty, the pure notion of "an action", that lurks just out of sight of the phenomenology?

Is material cause now the ghost in physics's formal machinery? — apokrisis

Right, all this gets into the metaphysics of causation. I don't personally find it an easy issue to delve into.

I did present one causal conundrum in my previous post on this thread. So far, I believe this conundrum touches upon the core source of disagreements in relation to the physicalist / non-physicalist theme.

this is similar enough to somebody’s comment about “that which breath’s life into the maths”. — javra

Worth mentioning that was Mr Blackholes, Stephen Hawking: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.”

there are some physicists who uphold the possibility that information itself might be both created and erased within Black Hole gravitational singularities — javra

See this blog post.

If you can gather information about the state of a system without spending free energy to record that information (or to reset your sensor/doorkeeper) then you can do work for free, you can have perpetual motion. This leads directly to Landauer's claim. — Srap Tasmaner

So does the fact that no such 'perpetual motion' device has ever been made refute that claim?

When a squirrel makes that "cat near my tree" sound, I don't think we need to call that rationality. It's involuntary, but it is exactly the kind of transformation we're talking about. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think it is the kind of transformation I was talking about in the OP, as that kind of transformation relies on abstraction, which is exactly what squirrels don't do. When a squirrel reacts to a sound, it is a matter of stimulus and response, not 'by gosh, that sounds like an apex predator!'

Now physics has switched over to a more idealist mode of description - information. It no longer makes any real presumptions about the nature of matter. Instead it freely speculates about the "fundamental constituents" in terms of pure forms. Particles could be vibrating strings, or excitations in the geometry of a network, or knots in spacetime dimensionality. — apokrisis

But in so doing, it also risks losing any relationship with reality. That is why Jim Baggott's book, referenced in the above blog post, is sub-titled 'Farewell to Reality' (note to self: must read again.)

Actually my point is really rather prosaic. It is simply this: that ideas are not material, but real in their own terms. They are not composed of material units of any kind, and can't be derived from physics, but exist in their own right, and on their own terms.

Nevertheless, as to the duality between some X which is interpreting information and the information itself: Is the squirrel here deemed an inanimate interpreter? Is the thermometer deemed an animate interpreter? Or, else, is there somehow deemed to be no meaningful difference between animate givens and inanimate givens? — javra

I start by distinguishing, let's say, "obvious" output and "not obvious": the difference between, say, on the one hand, dominoes falling in sequence, where each does to the next something a whole lot like what was done to it, and, on the other hand, a squirrel seeing a cat and making a particular sound.

There's a similar mechanism at work in a thermostat. A little information comes in and, if everything's working, leads to a large-ish action that consumes free energy. It's easy to imagine the automatic thermostat replacing the guy whose job it was to watch a thermometer and switch the furnace on or off.

Anyway, that's my admittedly simple-minded starting point.

Now there can be something similar without life (or an extension of it like the thermostat), in, say, an avalanche. Little input, big output that spends a lot of free energy. And there's an obvious connection in the way life keeps its "subsystems" balanced at criticality. You can get sensitivity by creating tiny avalanche conditions and then waiting, maintaining those conditions, and then resetting after each tiny event. Like a thermostat.

Certainly there's a difference between a squirrel and an avalanche, or, better, between the squirrel's "early warning" subsystem and an avalanche, in that the latter doesn't reset for new input. But beyond that, I just don't see the avalanche as resulting from information at all in the way the squirrel's warning does. What's the difference? I think it's precisely the transformation of the input. An avalanche is a big output of the same sort as its tiny input.

So yes I lean toward seeing the use of information about your environment, rather than just being shoved about by it, as a hallmark of life. But the information is still obviously physical, just as living things and their environments are. And I don't immediately see the need to describe this use as interpretation.