🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's my answer to this, taken from http://www.ii01.org/physics.html

 Information, or form, might be "just" an aspect of matter. But to think in
 terms of form rather than those of substance is a winning strategy in many
 situations-even in physics, never mind communications, computation, etc.
 Following Daniel Dennett, this strategy can be called "the formal stance". 

 The formal stance can be taken not only towards static physical structures
 and energy flow/causation, but also any physical process, which is how we
 get to "information processing". 

 Information processing is not a special sort of operation, but just an aspect
 of any physical process. When we take the formal stance towards what
 would otherwise be seen as a physical process, we see information
 processing. 

 Any two entities about to interact can be considered carrier and decoder,
 while the result of the interaction is the decoded message. There is no
 reason to confine the concept of physical information to individual entities,
 and in fact to do so would be inconsistent. The distance between any two
 entities, say two asteroids orbiting the sun, is an item of physical
 information, as is the way that distance changes over time. And the
 outcome of a collision between these things that has not yet occurred but
 will do so, is physical information too: what will happen in the future is
 implicit, or encoded, in what is happening now (assuming, for simplicity, a
 wholly deterministic universe). 

 Collisions, from the physical stance, correspond perfectly, believe it or not,
 to en- or decoding operations from the formal stance. Whilst every thing,
 such as an asteroid, "carries" its own physical information, information also
 exists implicit in the relationships between different things, even as such
 relationships change over time: before, during and after an actual
 interaction. All coded information is a function of the relationship between
 the carrier and the code as embodied in the decoding mechanism: in effect,
 it predicts the outcome of the interaction between them. That's what
 "encoded" means: it describes not a snapshot, the way things are at this
 instant, but the way they're "smeared" over time: what's happening now
 with what has happened and what will happen. To say that one thing is
 encoded in another is to predict that the former will emerge from the latter.
 The outcome of an asteroid collision is encoded, prior to the actual event, in
 the characteristics of the asteroids and the relationship between them. 

 Generalising from that, we get this: the relationship between matter and
 physical information is such that every material thing, every entity,
 encodes the outcomes of all of its potential interactions, where the
 decoding key in each case is its environment at that time. 

-- 
"A prime source of meta-memes" -- Inside Information -- http://www.ii01.org/
Robin Faichney