Observations from physicalist information theory and physical realist philosophy of information:
- A subjectivist about information (someone who thinks that information requires - or existentially depends upon - a subjective observer or signal-receiving and processing agent) has to explain why the the photons reflecting from the environment of the water's surface is necessarily any less storage of structural information than their mental representation (reducing to the processing of signals in the retinotopic map, perhaps) and the interaction between the two. They must explain why the green in the reflection is not providing information originating in the DNA in the tree, and why this in turn is not objectively existing structured information that would still be there without any observers.
- An eliminitavist about information (information is not some thing in the world - just a label we use for when objective frequentist probabalistic uncertainty is reduced for an observer) has to answer the same challenge.
This argument is not intuitive argument, but RAA. If subjectivism and eliminativism are correct, then there is nothing that we would normally call information in the DNA of trees. That seems simply wrong.
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