| That's just it though. Yes, separating symbols/descriptions from the physics is a common conflation, rightfully avoided and called out here, but I think you might be overcorrecting unconflating the concepts too much. Quantum information is strange precisely because the theory treats information-like relationships as physically consequential. Entanglement, path dependent stuff, cloning theorum, black hole information paradox... There are so many areas you run into where its information-centric descriptions appear to fit unreasonably well. Again, I'm not saying the symbolic representation is "real" per se (not saying it's not either, I simply don't know what it is). I agree bits are just nomenclature, but I don't agree that "bits" and "information" are the same thing. Like distance, "information" has a deeper and general architecture to it. And it's also weirdly physical in places that I wouldn't expect it to be, for reasons I simply don't understand at the moment. |
From Shannon's theory, it's abundantly clear that "information" is just a mathematical description of difference and expectation. I can frame anything as information. If I know who my parents are, a statement about who they are is not informative to me because it constitutes no difference. The entropy and expectation/surprise is low. If someone approaches me with a compelling argument that no, actually, my parents are not my parents I was adopted and my real parents are so and so, this is informative. The entropy is high.
Crucially, this all depends on me my personal history, and my status as an observer. It is in this sense that I find information to be a communications concept (which is how it started!) or semiotic concept more than a useful abstraction for organizing our knowledge about other parts of reality. Yes, the abstraction might still be useful if e.g. quanta end up behaving in some way according to shannon's laws, that is interesting, but to me uh at is not an argument that turns information into some kind of "universal substrate" of the real—it is just a surprising applicability of laws in one domain to another. Is it surprising that empirical data fit the model? Maybe. Idk, lots of empirical data can be made to fit all kinds of models (there are ways in which hI can reasonably take a Newtonian view of various aspects of my life and the data generally won't contravene the laws).