Information is not substance. It is an abstraction, a measure of symbolic difference, a way of modelling how systems can be distinguished and related. To treat it as the essence of reality is to collapse semiotic categories into physical ones — to mistake the grammar of construal for the fabric of being.
Relationally, information belongs to the symbolic order. It encodes potential distinctions, possibilities of meaning and alignment. Matter, by contrast, belongs to the order of instantiation: construal cutting into potential, producing phenomena. To claim that matter is information is not an elegant unification but a category error: it fuses the symbolic with the material, as if a map could turn into the terrain.
The seductive appeal of “information as ontology” rests on its metaphoric drift. The language of “bits” and “codes” suggests a hidden digital substrate, a cosmic computer churning out existence. But what this metaphor erases is precisely the reflexive condition that makes information possible: construal, interpretation, alignment. Information has no independent existence apart from symbolic systems that can encode, decode, and actualise it.
Thus, the claim that “the universe is information” is not a discovery but a metaphenomenal projection — the elevation of an abstraction to metaphysical principle. It reduces the richness of symbolic reflexivity to a flat ontology where meaning and matter are indistinguishable.
To resist this confusion is not to deny the power of information as a modelling tool. It is to keep clear the ontological distinction between symbolic potential and material instantiation. The universe is not made of information. Rather, information is one of the ways symbolic systems make the universe intelligible.
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