Everybody knows what “information” is. It is the stuff that overabounds online; which you ask the airport kiosk when you don’t know how to get downtown; or which is stored in your USB sticks. It carries meaning. Meaning is interpreted in our head, of course. So, is there anything out there which is just physical, independent from our head, which is information?
Yes. It is called “relative information.” In nature, variables are not independent; for instance, in any magnet, the two ends have opposite polarities. Knowing one amounts to knowing the other. So we can say that each end “has information” about the other. There is nothing mental in this; it is just a way of saying that there is a necessary relation between the polarities of the two ends. We say that there is "relative information" between two systems anytime the state of one is constrained by the state of the other. In this precise sense, physical systems may be said to have information about one another, with no need for a mind to play any role.
Such "relative information" is ubiquitous in nature: The color of the light carries information about the object the light has bounced from; a virus has information about the cell it may attach; and neurons have information about one another. Since the world is a knit tangle of interacting events, it teams with relative information.
When this information is exploited for survival, extensively elaborated by our brain, and maybe coded in a language understood by a community, it becomes mental, and it acquires the semantic weight that we commonly attribute to the notion of information.
But the basic ingredient is down there in the physical world: physical correlation between distinct variables. The physical world is not a set of self-absorbed entities that do their selfish things. It is a tightly knitted net of relative information, where everybody’s state reflects somebody else’s state. We understand physical, chemical, biological, social, political, astrophysical, and cosmological systems in terms of these nets of relations, not in terms of individual behavior. Physical relative information is a powerful basic concept for describing the world. Before “energy,” “matter,” or even “entity.”
This is why saying that the physical world is just a collection of elementary particles does not capture the full story. The constraints between them create the rich web of reciprocal information.
Twenty-four centuries ago Democritus suggested that everything could be just made of atoms. But he also suggested that the atoms are “like the letters of the alphabet”: There are only twenty or so letters but, as he puts it, “It is possible for them to combine in diverse modes, in order to produce comedies or tragedies, ridiculous stories or epic poems.” So is nature: Few atoms combine to generate the phantasmagoric variety of reality. But the analogy is deeper: The atoms are like an alphabet because the way in which they are arranged is always correlated with the way other atoms are arranged. Sets of atoms carry information.
The light that arrives at our eyes carries information about the objects which it has played across; the color of the sea has information on the color of the sky above it; a cell has information about the virus attacking it; a new living being has plenty of information because it is correlated with its parents, and with its species; and you, dear reader, reading these lines, receive information about what I am thinking while writing them, that is to say, about what is happening in my mind at the moment in which I write this text. What occurs in the atoms of your brain is not any more independent from what is happening in the atoms of mine: we communicate.
The world isn’t just a mass of colliding atoms; it is also a web of correlations between sets of atoms, a network of reciprocal physical information between physical systems.