Is information the fifth state of matter?
This seems like confusion over [the map&#x2F;territory relationship](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Map–territory_relation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Map–territory_relation</a> ):<p>&gt; &quot;A map is not the territory&quot;<p>Whatever reality might be considered to involve -- mass, energy, entropy, time, whatever -- it&#x27;s information that we actually consider in our minds.<p>In grade-school physics, it may be all too easy to confuse the map for the territory, because everything&#x27;s just so simple that students might feel little compulsion to put much thought into things.  But it&#x27;s always been information.<p>If someone wants a string 2-meters long, they might measure out two lengths of 1-meter strings, then tie them together.  If the result isn&#x27;t close enough to 2-meters, then they might reason that they ought to be more precise -- they ought to better measure the 1-meter strings, consider the length-contraction due to tying the knot, and so forth.  And then, they might think that there&#x27;s a difference between the string and their information about it.<p>But further away, in more exotic contexts like in sub-atomic quantum-mechanical arenas or near black-holes, there might be less intuition about the things like strings -- folks may be pushing harder, working more heavily with information without a background sense of naturalness.  Inferences may be drawn based on information, and then more built upon that information, until it seems like it&#x27;s all information.<p>But, to be clear, this isn&#x27;t some new quality of reality; it&#x27;s how stuff&#x27;s always worked.  It&#x27;s just how intellectual-computation works.  It&#x27;s just that, when things were simpler, folks didn&#x27;t care to consider it.<p>That said, reality isn&#x27;t quite &quot;<i>information</i>&quot;; it&#x27;s just our perceptions of reality that&#x27;re information.  This is, reality&#x27;s the territory, and our conceptions of it are the map.  More involved computational-modeling just helps make that more apparent by undermining more naive modes of thinking about it.