The Nature of Information

Abstract

Information is one of those terms which everybody thinks they understand, but the more closely we scrutinize the idea, the more elusive it becomes. A dictionary may define ‘information’ in terms of ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, or ‘experience’, but then defines these terms by referring them to each other, or back to information. It is clear that, although we all have an intuitive understanding of the term ‘information’, our understanding is not sufficient to allow us create, for example, a theory of information which would allow us to explain manifestations such as meaning, knowledge, insight, or wisdom. Nor, at the other end, when we are dealing with the smallest units of information — bits of data — do we have a satisfactory theory which can explain how these bits interact to create comprehensible language.