Hey Aaron, when you say:

"I think the difficulty in our aperture of understanding the world is that we are a subset of it. Therefore we perceive our world through the realm of matter as we know it."

I don't think I understand the 'therefore' reasoning here. It sounds like you're implying that matter is the fundamental nature of reality. Is that what you believe?

If so, are you saying that this "we" you mention is a subset of matter? Or, are matter and 'we' subsets of something else?

Also, for the benefit of this conversation, I need to admit that I'm not really sure I understand whether or not functional information is said to be an abstract reality underlying matter or if functional information is said to be a description of the behaviour of matter. Could you clarify?