Defending Informational Structural Realism

The paper analyzes some varieties of structural realism and proposes an expanded version of information structural realism (ISR). The version of non-eliminative ontic structural realism (OSR), which accepts entities and structures as ontological primitives and denies the existence of theoretical objects, is criticized. Arguments are given from the field of philosophy of science and physics (scientific realism, quantum mechanics and its information interpretation, digital ontology, string model tools) in favor of the fact that ISR, which asserts information as a fundamental reality, avoids the problems faced by existing approaches, in particular, by expanding ISR with the idea of alternative descriptions of reality (models) equivalent to each other. It is shown that fundamentally different theories (based on different space-time metrics) actually give the same description of reality, and, consequently, make the same predictions regarding the observed behavior of physical systems. Moreover, they, being equivalent, initially imply different visions of the fundamental structure, for example, with a different number of spatial dimensions. The philosophical interpretation of these results is that what is fundamental is not the traditionally understood physical reality (with substantial space-time as its main attribute), but the descriptions themselves, expressed in the form of alternative models – scientific representations of reality. Since they are the only ones available for research when it comes to the unobservable, the thesis that theoretical objects exist as ontological primitives becomes justified. Thus, it is proven that information itself is real and fundamental, being a tool and subject of research.