The concept of information — as it is used in biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science — is not a natural feature of living systems but a metaphor inherited from mid-twentieth-century communication theory and computer science. Despite its enormous heuristic productivity, this metaphor harbors unresolved conceptual problems: it requires readers without accounting for their origin, senders without explaining their agency, meaning without grounding it in physics, and directional flow without accommodating bidirectional interaction. Five major alternative frameworks (Developmental Systems Theory, autopoiesis/enactivism, biosemiotics, the Free Energy Principle, and niche construction theory) converge on the diagnosis — the information paradigm is inadequate — but none supplies a complete replacement vocabulary. This article proposes such a replacement: in-formation, defined as the process by which physical systems shape each other through direct interaction, leaving structural traces that constrain future interactions. In-formation replaces the dual-layer ontology of the information paradigm (physical substrate plus informational content) with a single-layer process ontology: physical shaping that is inherently bidirectional, operates in distinguishable modes (constructive, destructive, self-directed), and accumulates across distinguishable temporal scales (transient, iterated, fossilized). Applied to the deepest questions of biology, in-formation provides a continuous account of the transition from non-living chemistry to life, a naturalistic account of biological purpose, a dissolution of the meaning gap between Shannon and semantic information, and an explanation of why the genetic system appears to be a code — not because it is one, but because deeply fossilized in-formation produces opaque, precise products that mimic the surface properties of designed codes. The framework is proposed as a hermeneutic contribution to the philosophy of biology — a replacement ontology that dissolves persistent conceptual problems without claiming predictive novelty. Keywords: information metaphor, philosophy of biology, process ontology, in-formation, developmental systems, biosemiotics, autopoiesis
Rikard Calmbro (Sun,) studied this question.