Wheeler argued that anything physical... derives its... existence... from discrete detector-elicited information-theoretic answers to yes or no quant… - Julian Barbour

[W]e must distinguish three kinds of information: Shannon’s information, the uncertainty as to which message will be selected from a source; factual information, the content of such a message; and intrinsic semantic information, which distinguishes a random message, or configuration, from one that carries meaning and to some extent explains its... genesis. All... have... underpinning in things.

He... explain[ed] how the astronomers... had to grapple with the problem of defining definition, because for 2 1/2 millennia there had been just one standard of time... the rotation of the earth. ...[T]hat had provided an incredibly accurate clock. It's... lost only a few hours in 2 1/2 thousand years. ...Very easy to use. Astronomers only... had to glance at the night sky, at the... Big Dipper... to tell the time within a minute or two... But in the 1890s a crisis developed when they found that using the earth... and... Newton's laws of motion and gravity... the Moon was speeding up. ...[T]hey thought ...the earth was slowing down because of the tidal effects of the moon... and... this would mean that the earth was not a good timekeeper at the accuracy that they wanted.

[W]hat we call yesterday is self-contained and has its experience of being yesterday, and today has memories of yesterday; and therefor I say that it's later... but each is completely self-contained, and there's no reason why you should put one... here, and another one there...