In science practice is information physical?

Science is a pragmatic practice.  Scientific analysis and conclusions are offered as interpretations of methodical research. Most of science work-hours are from the design of an experiment and data collection to that purpose.  All good stuff -- that formally documents natural phenomena.  Summarizing patterns discovered in the data sets is the creative step.  Analysis afterwards has always been a free-for all, hopefully explaining the data.  It is the analysis part of science that can be co-existent with philosophy, when both are using logics and metadata as tools.

Natural data patterns are not the friend of Physicalism in the past decades, yet it is still given priority in analysis.  Informational Realism is a direct challenge to Physicalism's hold on context.  IR simply supports that there are at least two formal methodologies useful to explore nature DOE's and measurement of variables are as useful in information science as in material sciences.  At this time, information science and its formalisms are knocking the ball otta the park, theoretical physics is becoming more opaque.  (note: the materials science area has had great success recently with materials for processing information)

Information as the physical information of the "here and now" AND informational probability patterns in the past and future are real.  Cold, hard pragmatism needs to put this to bed.  The data patterns are clear!  Forces and structures in space are not at the beginning and end of all processes.  There are processes that start with probability, which are real and casual.  Information structures, affordances in the environment and states of mind are needed to document natural processes.  

The materialist concept was that information was from physical objects, so..... they were primary.  There is little science left that can stand by this metaphysical analysis trying to pass for logic.  This touchstone idea was explored and endorsed by Rolf Landaeur a founding information scientist.  He laid it mathematically so that it could be falsified by experiment. 

 In 1961, Ralph Landauer at IBM published a work suggesting that information, usually considered a purely mathematical quantity, played a role in physics...

Though Landauer famously said "information is physical," it turns out that information is not so physical after all.

 https://phys.org/news/2016-07-refutes-fa...sical.html

Just like the Weismann Barrier, in genetic coding, another rock-solid tenant of Physicalism, has gone up in smoke recently.  I urge anyone skeptical to read the link above and come back with argument.

Norbert Wiener said 73 years ago

Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism  which does not admit this can survive at the present day."

  There seems to be no new experimental result that denies this!  Just look at all the confirmations of non-locality.

Of course, in QM methods, information comes before physical manifestation with a super-position of states.  Its been decades since "It from Bit".  Information is a real measurable and casual source of natural action and now is at the forefront of analysis.  It should be seen as a separate environment with reductive patterned outcomes.
 
  
Pragmatically -- the evolution of mind uses ecological meaning and uses sense-driven logic --- as much as it navigates with legs and flippers.  Nature is alive with information processes and Psi is one.

I guess that's a typo, 'tenet' makes more sense than 'tenant'?

I guess that's a typo, 'tenet' makes more sense than 'tenant'?

Thanks,  I was all ready with the next citation, which has it correct, but still missed it.

The sense of what I am saying is that the confidence of a Merle, is a century behind modern science.  I hope he comes and discusses this.  It's time to stand firm on the facts.  Once information is included in the model of how things work, progress comes quickly.  The goal is to bring learning and understanding (as objective phenomena) into the functional roots of science.  My thesis is that there are real world probabilities and they have a structure and objective meaning.  As they change entropy - information objects are actively changing vectors in the physical environment.  Biological intent is a vector in modelling behavior, just as a mechanical forces are needed to model a car engine. In fact, living things leverage the same information processes in the adaptive behavior that drives evolution.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7768413/

 The Weismann barrier has long been regarded as a basic tenet of biology. However, upon close examination of its historical origins and August Weismann’s own writings, questions arise as to whether such a status is warranted. As scientific research has advanced, the persistence of the concept of the barrier has left us with the same dichotomies Weismann contended with over 100 years ago: germ or soma, gene or environment, hard or soft inheritance. These dichotomies distract from the more important questions we need to address going forward.....

We will contrast the principles underlying the barrier with recent and less recent findings in developmental biology and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance that have profoundly eroded the oppositional view of germline vs. soma. Discarding the barrier allows us to examine the interactive processes and their response to environmental context that generate germ cells in the first place, determine the entirety of what is inherited through them, and set the trajectory for the health status of the progeny they bear.

In fairness to Merle, I looked at some of his discussions of certain Christian sect's belief, such as young-earth creationism. That has never been of any significance in Britain (at least not in my lifetime) so it's hard for me to imagine how it is to have that as a starting point, and to break free from it. What I mean is, he has undergone a major upheaval in beliefs, it can be hard to go through that again unless there is some forward momentum and continuous searching.