Information as an Emergent Property of Biological and Civilizational Forms of Matter: An Ontological Alternative to Informational Physicalism

This article offers an ontological alternative to the widespread view in contemporary physics that treats information as a fundamental physical entity (“informational physicalism”). It is argued that information is not a primitive substance but an emergent property that appears only at specific levels of material organization. The analysis is based on the “Seven Forms of Matter” (7FM) hierarchical ontology. At Form 1 (physical matter), there is no information in the semantic sense — only physical configurations (particle positions, field strengths, quantum states). What an observer calls “information” is an epistemic relation, not an ontic property of the configuration itself. Information first emerges at Form 2 (biological matter) with the appearance of an interpreter — the organism. Here information is a relation between a physical signal and a living system capable of discriminating that signal (sense, measured in bits and shannons) and evaluating its biological value (valence, measured in berridges). At Form 3 (civilizational matter), information takes on a semiotic and cultural character: semes (atomic units of meaning, measured in semes) and memes (units of cultural replication, measured in dawkinses). These units are irreducible to physical units (SI) and have their own operational standards. This approach resolves pseudo‑paradoxes such as the black hole information paradox (loss of epistemic access, not destruction of information) and Landauer’s principle (dissipation is a property of the physical implementation, not of “information as such”). The article criticizes Wheeler’s “It from Bit” thesis, reformulating it as “It from configuration; Bit from life/civilization.” The metrological systems BioMU (for Form 2) and Cognitium (for Form 3) receive a natural grounding: they measure emergent properties that do not exist at the physical level. The article invites interdisciplinary discussion and serves as a bridge between physics, biology, social sciences, and information science. --- Keywords: information, emergence, Seven Forms of Matter, informational physicalism, BioMU, Cognitium, collapsar, Landauer’s principle, ontology, metrology.