Information as a force

Here’s an idea: Information is a force. Science has an explanation for planets attracting each other or particles repelling each other, but no explanation for a person stopping at a Don’t Walk sign, then moving when the sign changes to Walk. A physical body (a human being) moves, stops, then moves again, purely because of the information in the sign.

Information therefore sometimes makes changes in the world because of the state of a receiver of the information. If someone yells “duck!” in Chinese and the person next to me is Chinese and ducks, but I stay standing because I don’t understand Chinese, the information ‘contained’ in the word is also ‘contained’ in the brain of the Chinese person next to me, in the sense that the information is ‘understood’ and provokes a change in the universe.

It’s easy to be misled by thinking of light as information. It’s a kind of information (or a carrier of information?) which humans are particularly sensitive to. But an unseen person yelling “duck!” does nothing but emit sound waves. Sound waves change the shape of the air as they move, so part of the information is a change in the structure of the universe (or the creation of a structure) which interacts with a structure in the human brain and provokes another change in the universe (the movement of a human being).

So is information a force?