Greta
Energy too can be thought of as just an abstraction, being reality doing things in certain ways.
I'm open to the idea that at some fundamental level information can be a real thing in itself, that what we call/recognise as particles, energy, waves can be more fundamentally better described as a sort of manifestation of information.
But barring that, I think it's a misnomer to call those things information, as if that is their 'substance', with the properties we associate with substances and forces. I'd say information has no properties in its own right, because it's a type of framing or description we apply to real stuff. Information is always about something, not a thing in itself.
So while we, conscious critters, can create abstract conceptions such as talking about energy doing things as ''information'', what actually exists is stuff doing things in certain ways.
Energy cannot exist in its own right without some being in some kind of form or configuration. Likewise, all studies of energy concern themselves with energy's configuration. There is no such thing as stuff without a configuration.
Right, sorry if I wasn't clear. What exists is stuff (eg energy, a computer, a toaster, a person) and what it does. We can describe what stuff does, or its internal constituents/processes, as a configuration of that stuff.
Consider an electron. A point of energy, yet it can hold different information concerning charge and spin. Try to find an electron without these attributes.
Well I think saying it 'holds information like charge and spin'' is ambiguous, and what its really saying that charge and spin are properties of an electron, or what it does. That's real. Would you agree, or do you think there's more to it?
An entity may be highly dense but relatively simple, or it may be lightweight but informationally dense.
I think that saying something is informationally dense, in actuality means there are a lot of ways it can be described. Akin to Shannon information mentioned by Alta (as I understand it). Eg a complex constructions or processes can be described in more ways than simple ones. It's a framing involving describing a real thing/process, not an actual constituent of a real thing or process.
So when when we say a computer 'processes information' there is real stuff (the hardware) doing real things in specific ways (configurations). And if we manipulate that stuff to produce something meaningful to us, then that is communicated, like this post, in the form of a configuration of pixels creating symbols that we as conscious beings understand by decoding those symbols. It's us conscious peeps who make it an act of communicating (informing) facts/opinions/whatev, not a property of the computer hardware. (See Searle's Chinese Room).
And back to my hobby horse! When we talk about brains processing information, we're talking about physical stuff and physical processes. There is no extra ingredient added by descriptively framing that as ''information processing'', it has no extra explanatory power, except as a conceptualised type of framing (functionality for example). As far as I can see anyway. Maybe it does at some as yet unknown fundamental level of how stuff works, but that would be speculative.