Does substance ultimately boil down to information, as William Dembski argues in his metaphysics of information?
A viewer asks whether Robert would agree that substance boils down to information, noting that William Dembski wrote a book on the metaphysics of information.
Answer
The problem is that information has to be stored somewhere. If you speak of information by itself, you are speaking of something abstract; but real information, like the genetic code, is locked into a sequence, the arrangement of amino acids in DNA, and how that sequence changes from molecule to molecule is what carries the specific information, such as that your hair is blond or your eyes are brown. So you always need a substrate, a physical substance in the case of biological or cosmological life, to store the information. With spirits it is different, because a spirit is not a physical substance, yet information is still stored there; so instead of a physical substrate you have an ontological existence, a being with identifiable characteristics, such that you can say this is an angel and this is not, and that entity holds information. Either way, information does not exist by itself; it always requires an entity to hold it. That is about as far as I can take it.