Dear Mark,
I thank you very much for reading my essay, and for your interesting comment, which gives me the opportunity to clarify an aspect that perhaps in the text I have not explained very well.
You're absolutely right in saying that the term "information", which is used more and more often, is difficult to understand, not least because everyone tends to interpret it in the way that suits him best.
Without any pretense of completeness, I consider that information is objective component of the universe, of numerical nature and computable, e. g. by computers, that are so far the best systems to process information at our disposal. Subjective, or rather conventional, are on the contrary the coding systems of information, that is, the different languages in which it can be expressed. This means that information is indestructible, as many physicists now believe (Hawking, contrary to its earlier opinions, now seems to argue that even blacks holes cannot completely "swallow" information and cancel it). So information exists independently of the human mind and there would still be in the universe, even if there were no intelligent beings capable of understanding it. The same applies to the natural and real numbers (nomen omen), while calculus and the various numeral systems are products of human reason. But why only the natural and the real numbers would be independent of us? Because the reality is multiple and potentially infinite, on the one hand, and occurs in a continuous dimension (that is, in an actual infinity), on the other. I believe that also space and time have a numerical nature, but I would need much more than a post to argue this point.
About the relationship between information and the rest of reality, I think it can be explained, at least in part, by saying that information is a mathematical model of reality, and that their relationship meets the main concepts of model theory, and in particular what is asserted by the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem.
Many thanks for your kind interest and best wishes for everything. I look forward to reading your essay.
Giovanni