Reduced to a single phrase, the Shannon model tells us that "information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver (or molecular machine) as it moves from a before state to an after state."
It is the action of successful communication, not the message itself. The message doesn't matter - it could be DNA, Shakespeare's Hamlet, etc. The language doesn't matter either as long as the sender and receiver speak the same language.
And although the receiver decodes the message from the channel, consciousness is not necessary to the model. The same model applies to television, radio, computers, the internet, etc.
The elements of a successful message in order are: message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, decoding, receiver.
Information content is measured by the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver, in bits (which are not necessarily binary btw in Shannon's model.)
As far as I know, there is no known materialistic origin for information (Shannon, successful communication) in the universe. Indeed, there is a standing prize of a million dollars for the first scientist to propose a feasible answer to that problem. AFAIK, that prize has not been collected. I'd research it, but as I said, my time is very limited today.
To make a long story short, an astrophysicist friend of betty boop's - whose specialty is the sun - early on wondered about light as an information carrier (channel.) His speculation sounds like it might dovetail into your field of expertise.
Any hoot, I look forward to reading your next, dear brother in Christ!
My friend — the astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre, Senior Researcher at the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Science — conjectures the following (in The Book of the Living Universe, as yet unpublished in English):
We point out that virtual particles are ideal tools for biological organization. The spatial position and timing of creating and absorbing a virtual photon is allowed by quantum physics. Therefore, virtual photons can be created in due time to realize biologically useful couplings which serve as the physical basis for biological functions.Thus as Alamo-Girl has pointed out, in this model, the "sea" of virtual photons would be the communications channel of Shannon theory.On this basis, we can expect that biological organization acts within the realm of virtual photons; i.e., below the quantum level. According to our proposal, virtual photons realize the timing of biochemical processes as well as the activation of the biologically useful biochemical reactions that could not occur in the absence of activation. This means that virtual interactions and biological organization can hold the key to a full understanding of the forces of nature. Therefore, our proposal tells that at all interactions in which the vacuum can play a role, biological effects can be present.
Perhaps needless to say, Dr. Grandpierre seems not to regard physics as the "largest model," with biology a "special case" of that model. His proposal involves the conjecture that biology itself is the "largest model," and physics is a special case of it.
That's a very bold and daring thing to say nowadays. There's a huge pushback from the orthodox science community, to say the least, when a person says such a thing....