In a comment to another post that deserves its own post, the venerable Upright Biped hammers rvb8 and in the process gives us one of the most succinct and pithy summaries of the information issue I have seen:
Pierce’s 1860’s model of signification (i.e. the ability to specify something among alternatives) suggested that all representation requires interpretation in order to exist. This model is not only consistent with naturalist views of reality, it is basically demanded by those views — and for good reason. It’s true. Then Turing showed that we can impute representation and interpretation into an arrangement of matter (i.e. a physical system) and cause novel function to come into being. Von Neumann then took Turing’s machine and used it to show what is required for an autonomous self-replicator to exist, thereby establishing a threshold of complexity for such a system. He did this several years before his model was demonstrated inside the living cell. Crick then showed how a DNA molecule could carry a code, and further predicted that a set of adapters would be required within the system, which Zamecnik and Hoagland found three years later. But the code in DNA would still have to be demonstrated in order for us to know what it is (i.e. it could not be calculated from its dynamic properties). Nirenberg set out to accomplish this demonstration and won the Nobel prize for doing so. Pattee then carefully described the physics of the system, and at the very center of that system is a set of (rate-independent) physical representations and a set of (non-integrable) constraints to interpret those representations. Two things, rv, you can’t specify something in the physical universe without two things. This empirical fact was proposed in theory, confirmed by experiment, and has been universally demonstrated throughout all of history. Write that down. No one at your ideological cesspools has solved the symbol-matter paradox.