I think what gets overlooked in an information based view, is the nergy driving it.

Our minds only perceive information, because energy, being dynamic, is constantly destabilizing. It tends to wash out information, as well as create it.

And it is that role, both in creating and destroying information, that allows energy to explain information.

Consider a wave; The information would be frequency and amplitude, but they are not the power driving it, only the form that emerges as this energy crests and reaches its limits. Same as with a flower. The form/information it projects into our eyes is the cresting of the wave of energy manifesting it.

Which goes to the question of time. As we are mobile, intentional organisms, we sense a sequence of perceptions, extracted from all the information carrying energy bombarding our senses, so we think of time as the point of the present moving past to future.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So energy is “conserved,” because there is no physical past for it to recede into, nor future from which it arrives. It is the changing configurations of this energy, creating and destroying information/forms, which creates the effect of time. The past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality.

Consequently the energy, the processing, goes past to future, while the forms, the patterns being generated, go future to past. Much as consciousness goes past to future, while the thoughts and feelings go future to past.

(Thoughts are like waves cresting, fully formed. While emotions are the sense of the wave building, or receding, but not fully/clearly expressed.)

So if we want to understand the past, we study the information, but if we want to understand the future, we should study the energy. Sometimes the future is as much reaction to the present, as continuation of it. Fluctuations.

The future is not determined, because the entire process of computation, which does the determination, only exists as the present. We might think of it as inertial and thus determined, but since much of the input into any event is arriving at the speed of light, it cannot be fully known, prior to the occurrence of the event.

Short of some external observer, but the consciousness of that observer would still be a function of the bottom up energy driving and motivating it, not the top down point/frame of reference, from which it observes.

It is our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, the heart and gut, processing the energy driving us on, hence associated with the desires and impulses bubbling up, that our cognitive processes only sort and referee, not cause. So it is the energy driving us, the motor, while the brain only steers.

Which might explain why the banks and power companies tend to exert more influence over society, than governments and universities.