Since when is the force between like poles of a magnet a physical one.
Since the beginning of time.
"Physical" is the word we use for all forces described of the existence, rather than the particularities of shape, of a thing.
If you want to discuss "spiritual" or "abstracted information", maybe make a new thread for that.
There is nonetheless a "Hierarchy of Stuff".
At the very bottom lives the "fundamental quantum mechanical physical layer".
Stuff like "up/down" and "color charge" etc.
This stuff behaves pretty much "tethered" to a function of math against the "quantum" values, which themselves are numeric constants. Some approaches to describing quantum numbers allow operation with whole numbers.
This would allow considering the universe in terms of digital math rather than "true analog".
Perhaps this is where you get your binary worship from, but it is not mystical nor proof of "god".
It is the nature of several "normal functions" to have a fundamental instability at zero, such as infinite sums on sin(x*n).
It is clearly, observably a
property that "nothing", depending on its nature, may be unstable, and immediately so lead to something.
How and why that function arises is a mystery, but I am pretty sure we are close to figuring out what the function "probably" is.
I say probably because Godel's Incompleteness Theorem states that we can't actually be certain we are right. It is fundamentally
impossible to be certain about being right.
But above this layer is the baryonic layer, and above that is the atomic layer, and layers and layers still.
All these things interact built on those fundamental "physical interactions" and these "physical interactions" mediate any other behavior you may observe, as far as we can tell.
Way up here in the macroscopic world, a construction of fundamental physical particles, held together by electromagnetism, gravity, weak force, and strong force, then a construction of those constructions held together by the same fundamental physical forces that shit was constructed of, and then constructions of that shit in the same way, and so on until you get cells, and organs as constructions of cells, and constructions of organs as people.
Somewhere in the mix you get waves of the constructions, not just the individual particles, and waves of activity there.
They aren't exactly energy. It's more of a "state wave". Energy moves but really it's the states that are being tracked: which place there is matter/energy rather than which matter/energy is there of all the particles.
The constructions are treated fungible by the system.
As it is, what that wave is, has been described very well.
For me, though, they aren't assertions from a book. I have, myself, built a computer. Not just assembled parts but actually designed the whole processor. I have, myself, also built a neuron.
Not just assembled some parts but rather
forced myself to understand the whole mathematical model, built a compiler (for the processor I designed), compiled that mathematical model into a set of machine instructions, ran that set of machine instructions on a... Ok, here I cheated and used a larger memory and swapped out for compilers other folks built, on an actual x86 processor with a few gigs of ram.
Then I put together that neuron with a few thousand other neurons. Then I taught it how to identify "negative" tweets.
All this mediated by those four physical fields.