ABSTRACT
In the dialectic between matter and information as described so far in this book, only information, and not matter, has proved itself indispensable to our understanding of the world. Indeed, matter, on closer inspection, always reveals itself either as an abstraction with no firm grip on reality or as itself an informational entity. Moreover, matter is a reductionistic concept in that items of matter are always to be understood in terms of smaller items of matter that jointly compose it.1 Part-whole relations thus become intrinsic to matter, and any information that matter represents reduces to how those parts are structured into a whole. Materialism thus tends toward a static view of information in the sense that, once material constituents are suitably arranged and in no danger of rearrangement, matter will henceforth convey the information that’s there and not lose it. The image of information associated with matter is that of a book in a hermetically sealed compartment: the ink arranged on paper to form a meaningful text will in this case constitute information that continues indefinitely.
