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Information is stored order that is produced and used by living matter, i.e. by plants, bacteria, animals, fungi and humans.

Living matter exists only in energy-depleting steady states (flow equilibria). According to the current state of knowledge, this applies without exception to all known forms of living matter, to individual organisms as well as to social structures formed by individuals.

All flow equilibria of living matter tend incessantly towards decay, towards the dissolution of the existing order.

In physics, the degree of disorder achieved in a limited space is characterised by an independent, measurable quantity. This is the entropy.
Entropy changes are measurably detectable in all ordered physical structures that participate in some way in energy balancing processes or in energy transformation processes.

Individual biological organisms and social "organisms" composed of them are highly ordered physical structures that constantly carry out energy transformations to maintain their flow equilibria.
They are therefore subject to nature's incessant drive for order decay (the law of entropy) to a particularly high degree.

An effective means of living matter to stop and push back its continual decay of order is information.
This is precisely what the genetic information in all the cells of the body is needed for, as well as the mental information in our brains and the technical information in our devices.

In contrast to the entropy law, which permanently creates new disorder in favour of uniform distributions, old order in the sense of uneven distributions can be maintained or restored with the help of information.

Macroscopic balance through microscopic mixing is the universal motto of the entropy law.
The disorder produced by this law is the strictest order imaginable: The "single-valued" order of the fluid plane.
In contrast, any information presupposes the maintenance of at least a two-valued order.

In the constant struggle against the perpetual intermixing of nature, living matter must ceaselessly occupy its own and other matter for information purposes, i.e. order it in a certain way and ensure that this (multivalent) order is maintained.
Only in this way can living matter secure its own existence and further development.

Every piece of information is thus based on an occupation process that emanates from living beings.

Living matter can only survive the battle with the (brainless) entropy law if it processes as much information as possible than is actually required.
Any deficit of information, no matter how small, can escalate into a deadly danger in the next moment. This is just as true in the wild as it is in road traffic.

The constantly necessary surplus of information has also shaped the evolution of living matter on our planet and, in some of its species, led to the development of single brains, i.e. special organs for storing and processing information.

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