It has become ordinary to speak of the world as information. Genes as code. Brains as processors. Markets as signal. The metaphor is so successful that it stops sounding like a metaphor.
There is a reason it works. A great deal of what we can predict, we can predict by treating a system as if it were processing inputs into outputs. Computation is a real method. It is also, quietly, a metaphysics: the claim that what a thing is, is what can be encoded and transformed.
The claim is not empty. It has built machines that write, see, and speak with a fluency that used to belong only to minds. That success tempts a further step — that mind itself is software, and that the remainder is hardware we have not finished describing.
The remainder is the interesting part. Information, as used in the lab, is a measure of surprise relative to a model. It is not a substance. It does not sit in the world the way water sits in a glass. When we say the world is information, we are often smuggling a model into the place where a world should be.
This thread is for that tension. Not for gadget news, and not for panic. For the older question, restated: if reality can be computed, what, if anything, is left over — and does a life have to be lived as if the leftover were nothing?
Quoted For Truth keeps AI & Computation beside Science on purpose. Science is the laboratory path. This is the path that treats software as a picture of mind, and then asks whether the picture can bear the weight we are putting on it.