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

[S]tability of solids, the fossils and rocks... exist... essentially unchanged. ...[T]he configuration carries intrinsic semantic information... different intelligent beings can in principle deduce the law or process.. Support for this is is the independent discovery of evolution by natural selection by Wallis and Darwin.

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.

Shannon information... [which] he also called entropy or ... involves things (...Shannon ...messages) and probabilities for those things.