> If you have to reference human minds to make it meaningful, then it's not objective. It's a cultural construct.
The fact that certain proteins, e.g. androgen receptors, alter their shape in the presence of specific androgens, implies that the protein's configuration contains mutual information with the shape of the androgen. But this connection between the androgen and its receptor is independent of minds to recognize the connection.
Sure, there's no need to mention information in this example to explain the observed behavior. But it's important to understand information as "merely" another kind of description of a system that may be revelatory depending on the context, rather than a new ontology that is competing to displace our old ontology.
So saying the receptor has mutual information with the shape of the androgen is just another description of the system that abstracts over some details and highlights others. Going further with the biology example, the concept of mutual information helps to clarify why some sequence of DNA nucleotides are instructions to create proteins that have a particular shape to interact with this molecule or enzyme or whatever. Without the concept of information, we would need to speak of long causal chains and the evolutionary history of this region of DNA with respect to various environmental influences and so on. The concept of information serves to clarify this connection in a much more direct manner.
That makes sense, but when you're asking philosophical questions about the ontology of computing and information, then if talk of information is just a shortcut for the messy complicated physical process, one can eliminate it from the fundamental "furniture" of the world.
One might respond with a shrug and who cares, but then we have people making rather strong claims about the universe being a computer and bit from it. Similar to mathematical universes instead of just physical stuff.
Notions like Kolmogorov complexity make information a measurable quantity. E.g. most possible configurations are incompressible. Only a few are compressible.
Additionally, having access to the information of one system allows us to reduce the amount of information needed to describe another system, and we get mutual algorithmic information.
So the notion of information is not just syntactic sugar, but distinguishes between different types of physical configurations in a way that enumerating their parts cannot.
The fact that certain proteins, e.g. androgen receptors, alter their shape in the presence of specific androgens, implies that the protein's configuration contains mutual information with the shape of the androgen. But this connection between the androgen and its receptor is independent of minds to recognize the connection.