I believe it is somewhat a case of the hammer becoming the house. If you deal in information-as-concept frequently, it will become the lens through which you view everything, even yourself and others. I will use Dawkins as analogy: He is (I might say 'was' because he seems to have embarked on a new career a while back) an evolutionary biologist with his particular brand of neo-Darwinism. So, everything he writes and talks about will come through this lens he sees through. This doesn't take away from things we can learn when he goes cross-discpline. However, it can lead him to some glossing over of important factors from the disciplines he is analogizing TO the evolutionary biology that he knows so well. [I don't care for the direction he's taken in his 'new career' but I'm resisting negativity here as I appreciated his earlier self] So, I could be wrong, but this is what I think might be happening in the case of integrated information theory: the hammer turned into a house: the tool became "the thing itself": a danger for anybody who works in a very specific field and looks at everything from that vantage point. To a cook, everything is an ingredient: that sort of thing.