INFORMATIONAL REALISM

Informational Realism asserts that the ability to exchange information is the defining feature of reality, of what it means, at the most fundamental level, for any entity to be real. Informational realism does not deny the existence of entities or substances. But within informational realism, what defines things is their capacity for communicating or exchanging information with other entities. Information is the relational glue that holds reality together, thus assumes primacy in informational realism. Things that are not in immediate or mediate informational contact with other objects might just as well not exist and so, in fact, don't exist within informational realism. Informationally isolated or disconnected entities thereby become nonentities. In substituting information for perception, informational realism is able to preserve a common-sense realism that idealism has always struggled to maintain. All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. Scientists, not philosophers, have been guiding us to recognize information as the most fundamental aspect of reality. Logic and information thus become the bedrock of physical theory. Nature is indeed, at bottom, informational.