02.KO - Domains Should Integrate Information as Physical

Domain: physics
Date: 2026-04-02

Claim: When a field studies a process that stores, transmits, changes, or responds to information, its explanation should include the relevant physical carriers and constraints.

Problem: Explanations of behavior, language, and social systems can describe what information means or does while leaving the physical signal, state change, or transmission mechanism unspecified.

Why this is a problem: An explanation that leaves out the physical mechanism may stop at a label instead of identifying a cause. It can also encourage untested stories where a measurable account may be possible.

Why it matters: Including the physical part of an information process can improve causal models in behavioral and social sciences. This does not require reducing every explanation to physics. It requires including physical constraints when the claim depends on information being stored, carried, or changed.

That requirement is scoped to the causal step being claimed. It does not require reducing every explanation to its lowest physical level. Nor does it make semantic content identical to its carrier or treat identifying a carrier as a complete explanation of meaning.

Plain summary: If information is doing causal work in an explanation, identify the physical process through which that work occurs.

Authorship and evidence

• The cross-field recommendation is Summer’s original analysis.
• System contributed the causal-step boundary, anti-reduction distinction, and source architecture.
• Landauer supports the premise that information requires physical representation; he does not establish Summer’s cross-field methodological recommendation.
• Borst and Theunissen provide an empirical example of information-theoretic analysis tied to measurable physical stimuli and neural responses; they do not establish the recommendation as a universal rule.

Sources

• Landauer, R. (1999). Information is a physical entity. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 263, 63–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-4371(98)00513-5
• Borst, A., & Theunissen, F. E. (1999). Information theory and neural coding. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 947–957. https://doi.org/10.1038/14731

Related note:
Information is Physical