Information and reality

Anton Zeilinger in The Edge's annual question forum believes that "quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality". I believe that he is making a very common mistake with this interpretation -- he is confusing the representation of reality, in whatever terms are open to the observer, with the reality being observed. In fact, I see this mistake so often, I wonder if philosophy has already identified it as a true fallacy. "The subjective fallacy"? Zeilinger even cautions himself against subjectivism.

A physical theory is really just the same as any other model of reality: it attempts to predict certain behaviours in a physical system given its boundary conditions and the rules it follows. It is only able to do so within its own context. It is not the reality that it is being used to model, it is merely the closest one can arrive within the informational system used to represent it. The degree of precision of the predictions has no impact on the "reality" of the informational system nor on the informational content of the reality. They just happen to match up, is all.

One might just as well claim that your dreams last night were real because they appeared to follow physical laws, or that reality is a dream because you can imagine it.