InformationAsaSubstance
Our poor brains need analogies to grasp some concepts.
Information is a meta concept.
Treating it as something tangible can help us to understand it.
In our brains we have hardwired components for interactions with people. We recognise eyes, faces, and even model other people in our minds. This has a deep evolutionary history. When we developed wider concepts we often used personification as a bridge. That river is described as 'old man river', the seasons of the year seen as a person growing older and being born.
My poor brain finds little analogy from information to substance. When substance has form, it seems to have information, but substance by itself appears to be an InformationVacuum. InformationVacuum may be a bad analogy, since nature abhors substance vacuum but seems to favor InformationVacuum.
Bad Example. Nature doesn't care, one way or the other, about vacuums. We often think Nature does, but that's due to using just one data point in the full set. We are down in a gravity well, with lots of matter banging about against each other down here. That business (and friction) creates the 'High concentration to low concentration' behavior we think is the guiding rule of this lone data point. The truth is, Nature has swept up our matter into a nice, discreet dust bunny that she may do something about, eventually. Before that, we were a nice diffuse cloud... now all that space we used to be in is a vacuum. See? With there being more Vacuum then Matter, and with Nature clumping Matter together, we would be better off saying, Nature prefers to make as big a vacuum as Nature can. --StarPilot, at it again. :-D
Money is information about human value as energy is the information about the basic nature of our universe. Information as energy is substance by e=mc^2.
Money is the HumanAnimal's most concentrated effort at ExtremeCollaboration. What an accomplishment, eh? (Actually, I say yes and no.) --StarPilot