Information as Substance

In the age of digital metaphors, “information” is often treated as if it were a physical stuff — a fluid that flows, a commodity that can be packaged, transported, and stored. We hear of “bits” as the new atoms, as though information were the most basic material of reality.

But this is a profound category mistake. Information is not a substance at all, but a relation. It is not something that exists “in” the world like a fluid, but something that comes into being through construal: a way of aligning systemic potential with symbolic instance.

To speak of “information flowing” between particles or across spacetime is to project the metaphor of plumbing onto the ontology of meaning. Information is not transmitted; it is construed. It does not flow; it emerges when patterns are cut from potential and recognised as meaningful.

When physicists reify information as a substance — to be “stored” in black holes or “erased” in entropy — they obscure the relational nature of meaning itself. Information does not belong to matter as a secret ingredient. It belongs to construal, to the symbolic alignment through which matter itself becomes meaningful.

The metaphor of substance blinds us to this, suggesting that the world traffics in information independently of the symbolic. But information is not what the world has. It is what we make when we construe.