The “one stuff in the world” Polkinghore was searching for is consciousness. That “I am that I am” which was before Abraham and Jesus were. But “material and mental phases” exist in continuous transition – there is no absolute material or mental. Thus also no absolute separate guiding information.
Although it was experimentally demonstrated that information can directly translate to work, you cannot achieve the effect without considering the whole apparatus (i.e. system) that was necessary to make the effect to happen. To quote the authors, “the microscopic device gains energy at the expense of the energy consumption of a macroscopic device.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys1821
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
Ergo, the computer analogy Polkinghore uses is inaccurate. You cannot consider the state of computer and energy that operates on processor gates as two separate things because the state of computer hardware (processor gates and other) also influences the energy flow and thus the resulting patterns. You simply must consider the whole system. Take e.g. a DVD where the information is encoded as energy configuration of a piece of matter while this configuration in turn defines physical properties of the DVD medium (see empty DVD and one with some files burn on it).
And since matter-energy-information equivalence was proved and demonstrated (see above), it means that there cannot be an independent guiding top-down information which could be separated from the rest of the universe. Information is already “created” and contained, baked in, and equivalent to matter and energy (which are just movements of insubstantial consciousness you know as “I am”).
