The Ontology of Information: Energy Texture, Constraint Encoding and the Physics of Meaning

What is information? Is it a fundamental substance, a mathematical abstraction, an epistemic construct, or an emergent property of physical systems? For nearly a century, the relationship between information and energy has been quantified—from Szilard's analysis of Maxwell's demon to Landauer's principle and the Sagawa-Ueda generalized second law—yet the ontological question of why information is inherently bounded by energy has remained unresolved. Energy-Efficiency Theory (EET) provides a first-principles answer: information is structured energy difference—the texture of energy. It is not an independent ontological category but a specific organizational pattern of energy gradients, made manifest and…