Mr. Smith,
Thank you for your kind words. Your comments are really appreciated.
Regarding the lack of grounding in my essay I think that it comes from the confusion it exists when we try to define the basic concept of information. To use your billiard analogy, we need to "land" two "feet" on the ground to define information:
On one "foot" we can see information and its processing as the most important attributes of our organizations. However, a year ago, Grady Booch said in an interview for Scientific American titled "Software's Dirty Little Secret" that "In other disciplines, engineering in particular, there exist treatises on architecture. This is not the current case in software, which has evolved organically over only the past few decades. All software-intensive systems have an architecture, but most of the time it's accidental, not intentional. This has led to the condition of most software programming knowledge being tribal and existing more in the heads of its programmers than in some reference manual or publicly available resource." As a result, not much grounding here... and it comes from one of the top experts in the field.
In our practice we have been very successful "anchoring on the ground" the concepts of information and organization presented in the essay. On this topic, we are presenting two papers this fall. One paper will be presented at BICA 2009 AAAI Conference in Washington and is titled: Back to the Basics - Redefining Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence Using Only the Adaptive Systems Theory. The other paper will be presented at TePRA, a conference about robotics and its title is: A Generic Information-Centric Architecture for Robotic Systems Derived from a New Theory for Adaptive Systems.
The other "foot," which extends the same information concept and its processing to the entire Universe I agree that it is based on a very bold assumption. However, I have a hard time to see some solid "ground" in current theories where I can land this "foot." The way I see it, there is some basic confusion when comes to the relation between information and the atomic world. I will give only two examples:
(1) If we define information as an interaction, black holes can easily "escape" information, contrary to what is believed (in 1970's physicist Stephen Hawking asserted that any information sucked inside a black hole would be permanently lost). Gravity and magnetism fields can carry information that can be "exchanged" (including "escape") with other external objects with no problem. The big difference is in energy level required.
(2) The other example is the huge effort researchers spend in quantum computing field. Experiments show that a worm called C. elegans has only 1000 cells and 302 neurons and is more adaptive and reliable than any complex, multi-billion, information-based military equipment we ever built. This shows that we still need to uncover how basic stuff works before we jump to qubits.