When I got my start in data science there was a meme that likened data a collection of raw facts, think cells in a in a table or rows in a database, as the beginning of a recipe of knowledge if you will. and so the conventional wisdom when that data got compiled into information which then drove decisions. fast forward a couple decades and I’ve learned in my research with the information theoretic universe that it’s the other way around: data are our way of recording the universe’s information, and we so frequently flip things in a certain mirror image or fractal of different scales of reality that we interpret and perceive. In fact rather than action or some physical manifestation of data through information, the informational universe that we record in data (think about the enormous amount of data collected when particles smash together), that simultaneously manifests that information those instructions if you will into physical reality. Perhaps we should refine our terminology to differentiate between the synthetic information that we generate from that data collected from the universes information and the blueprint or instructions or code of the universe itself the determines things like particle direction and spin.