Hi Karl,
I was very glad to find your essay and enjoyed it very much, since my own ( An Observable World ) also deals with the assumption that the informational environment we can observe must be based on some kind of underlying reality. I was especially happy with your thoughts on the history of the universe, since I'd wanted to include something similar in the last part of my essay. I had to cut it, since the piece was already too long and too condensed.
The main difference between our approaches is that you're envisioning a physics based on a new kind of fundamental entity, the bit -- per your response to Georgina Parry above. You told her information exists in the same way we think of objects as existing. To me, the key point about information in physics is that it's observable, i.e. definable in the context of other observable information. Some kinds of physical information do resemble binary bits, but I don't think it's helpful to think of all such information as reducible to simple interchangeable bits. Instead, the question is how all the different kinds of physical information contribute to an environment that's able to define them all, in terms of each other.
If we open up the question of how information gets physically defined, we get a picture of the informational environment that's anything but elegant or unified . So I don't envision replacing our theories of fields and particles with an all-embracing theory of information. To the extent that it works to describe our world in terms of real, objective entities, I think we should certainly do so. My point is that we shouldn't be surprised that this kind of theory doesn't work at a fundamental level. It's only when we try to understand how our theories fit together, how they constitute a basis for the observable world, that we need to switch over to an informational viewpoint.
Anyhow, it will be some time before it's clear just how to make this conceptual shift, from the world as a structure of real things-in-themselves -- inferred from phenomena -- to the structure of communications that constitute the phenomena. I appreciate your brave incursion into this unexplored territory.
Thanks -- Conrad
