Energetic and Informational Regimes as Organizational Phases of Relational Dynamics

This is a preprint version of a manuscript submitted to Foundations of Physics. The paper is currently under review and has not yet been peer reviewed. Abstract The concept of information plays a central role in contemporary physics, yet its ontological status remains deeply unclear. Information is often treated as something that is contained in physical states, encoded in structures, or stored in physical media. This way of speaking, which underlies both information-theoretic and physicalist slogans such as “information is physical” or “it from bit”, remains conceptually ambiguous. In this paper we argue that a code or a configuration, taken in isolation, is informationally inert. Within a relational, process-based framework, such structures provide only a relational potential: a capacity to produce different outcomes in suitable interactions. Building on the relational ontology developed in our earlier work on the relational origin of time, space, energy, and gravitation , we treat relational instabilities and their actualization as the fundamental substrate of description. From this perspective, both energy and information are understood not as primitive enti- ties, but as two complementary organizational aspects of the same underlying relational dy- namics. Energy is associated, at an effective level of description, with the parallel relaxation of relational tensions, while information is associated with the sequential, history-dependent organization of relational updates into patterns that can function as comparisons, records, and controls. This sharpens and systematizes intuitions already present in relational and process-based approaches to physics and in the idea of information as an effective difference. The proposed perspective clarifies why not every form of structural complexity or self- organization gives rise to informational organization, and why memory and functional struc- ture must be understood as stabilized constraints on future relational processes rather than as passive repositories of encoded content. A central conceptual consequence is that infor- mation is not an intrinsic property of states, but an interaction-dependent feature of certain regimes of relational dynamics. The framework is not proposed as a new physical theory, but as a conceptual and or- ganizational tool for clarifying the role of energetic and informational descriptions in the foundations of physics.