Informational vs Physical

A very common mistake can be seen in modern scientific literature, a naive error that exposes many things, maybe the more relevant is the lack of philosophical sophistication (or to be sincere, basic philosophical thinking) in most "men of science".
The mistake is the way in which many proposers of Digital Physics (or any name that you like) replace the word Physical with Informational. They are not making any revolution, they are just playing with words. Interchanging Informational ~ physical and maintaining the old naive realism is just buzzword.

But the "information revolution" in physics is very real and deep. It started 90 years ago with Quantum Mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation. Then the late John A. Wheeler expanded the spartan Copenhagen way of thinking (he was a Bohr collaborator) and coined the catch phrase It From Bit. His 1990 paper is a jewel of modern thinking:

"every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely — even if in some contexts indirectly — from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
Wheeler 1990, "Information, physics, quantum: The search for links", p. 5.


He was the godfather of Quantum Information and paved the way to a new branch of research enriching physics, computation and information theory. One of the modern mottos in the field is Information is physical. The key point here, I think, is that our very conception of the two concepts changed, and in fact we are talking about aspects of the same thing. Information implies a knower, we cannot talk of information without talking of the subject. In the other hand, physics, until the XX century, was independent of the knower, the observer, but QM showed that in Nature each phenomena arises in an interaction between subject-object.
The great theories of the last century, QM and Information theory married and now we cant talk  quantitatively about the physical resources involved in information processing.

Modern physics is infected with "magical wavefunction ontologists", people that believes in the objective existence of a mathematical tool. But physics doesn't deals with what is (a picture of a world independent of our experience) it deals with what we can say about our experience of Nature, physics its a tool to organize our experience, learn about it and make predictions about what we can experience in the future.

This is nothing new for philosophers but for the first time Nature showed it clearly to Natural Philosophers (scientists) when they made the right questions (experiments).
And what is the simplest proposition? A yes-no question, 0,1, with a yes-no answer, that is the message of the quantum.

Information is physical, physics is about information, and physics is about our very experience. This seems paradoxical but it isn't, we must update our concepts. Experience is fundamental, you cannot go behind experience, and experience can be analyzed as information processing.