Information Realism

Information realism is the author’s view that what fundamentally exists is information — structure that can be described, copied, transformed, and propagated — physically instantiated, including as patterns in waves and in any medium that holds a stable encoding (brains, stone, text, ritual, records).

This is not idealism in the sense of mind without matter. Carriers are physical; propagation follows physical law. It is the claim that the deepest uniform description of both carriers and emergent entities is informational: couples, artworks, institutions, and conceptualized deities are information-bearing structures whose identity is maintained by propagation, not by listing particles alone.

What this claims

• Everything is information in the sense that any complete account bottoms out in structured states and transformations — including what we call matter and waves.
• Emergent entities are paradigmatically informational: they exist when a pattern coheres, persists when copied into new carriers, and causes when that pattern drives action.
• Prior chains (biology, language, myth, physics) are themselves informational processes; a concept does not start ex nihilo with its first articulator.

Propagation lenses

The author uses genetics and memetics as reasoning tools for how information persists — not as separate substances or as adopted doctrine wholesale.

• Genetics — the biological variant: genes and developmental structure as replicators copied through reproduction, mutation, and selection. Prior chains (biology, language capacity) long predate any named concept.
• Memetics — the cultural variant (Dawkins’s meme): ideas, rituals, doctrines, and images copied through imitation, teaching, and record. Emergent entities — couples, artworks, conceptualized deities — persist when the pattern propagates across carriers.

Both are multi-level: identity is in the pattern, not in any single body or stone; fidelity and drift determine what survives.

Relation to other stance terms

• Emergent physicalism — information is how physical grounding shows up at the level we can describe and capture.
• Emergent entities — ontological creation of new things; most are constituted by propagated information.
• Multi-level explanation — information is often the right level to state and revise a pattern before chasing lower mechanisms.

What remains open

Consciousness — whether subjective experience is fully accounted for by information physics is not settled here. Information realism is a metaphysics of structure and propagation; the hard problem of experience is separate.

Affinities (not doctrine)

Overlaps with structural realism, Wheeler’s “it from bit,” and information-theoretic physics — cited as kin, not as authorities the author adopts wholesale. Genetics and memetics (Dawkins) are cited the same way: useful lenses for propagation, not a full metaphysical program.

Origin: Philosophical stance