Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 141 of 171
Information is like lift
The concept of information is useful; so is the concept of lift for flight. This does not mean that lift is real. Importantly, we do not include lift in fundamental physics because the phenomenon of lift is reducible to still more basic laws of physics like mass and gravity. Lift is a successful descriptive strategy that allows humans to build airplanes, but the idea of lift is a simplified model of a much more complex underlying reality. Lift is therefore not an observer-independent phenomenon. Without conscious agents like humans, there is no such force as lift in the universe. It is exactly the same situation for computations and information.