What is information?
As we can see the category “information” and its properties are at the center of our questions. If we want to study the properties of something, we must know our subject of study, we must know what it is?
What we imagine when we hear the word or term “information”? Most often it is information or messages that we receive or read (watch the picture or video), or listen to, and most likely, search for on the internet – Google. We also use such terms as “data”, “facts”.
Since all human activity is connected with information, many concepts have been developed that reflect the nuances and subtleties of the meaning of the concepts of the information: -
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Data – collected (received), unprocessed (raw) information;
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Facts – confirmed, verified information;
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Message – information received from somebody;
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Content – information that provides brief description, essence of something;
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Details - synonym of information sometimes used to define as well as content.
Less often than the term “information” we use the term “knowledge”. What do we know about knowledge? It is hard to believe, but if we summaries all definitions of the category ”knowledge” that are found in literature, then all we know about knowledge is that it is higher in level than information, it is in the head (consciousness) of a person and is very important for his life (“knowledge is power”). More precisely, knowledge is information understood (realized) by the person and thus integrated in his system of knowledge. There are much fewer definitions that reflect the nuances of meaning of the definition “knowledge”: -
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Experience is knowledge obtained as the result of one’s own practical activity (“the son of difficult mistakes”).
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Wisdom is experience plus ability (capacity) to generate new knowledge based on it.
As you can see, the category “information” is the basis of all the above mentioned terms. And if we ask ourselves seriously the question: - “What is information?”, then the answer will not be so simple. Looking into philosophy encyclopedic dictionary, we will find 4 definitions of the concept of information^
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Message, awareness of the state of affairs, information about something transmitted by people;
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Reduced, removed uncertainty as a result of receiving messages;
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Message inextricably linked with control, signals in the unity of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristic;
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Transmission, reflection of divercity in any object and processes (inanimate and animate nature) [2, с.1556].
And in more modern encyclopedia (in Wikipedia) we will find confirmation of the variety of information definition: - “Despite its widespread use, the concept of information remains one of the discussed in the science, and the term can have different meaning in different areas of humane activity [3].
Despite such different understanding, everyone around uses term “information” and knows that it can be measured precisely (for example, determine how mane bits or bytes in this file), it can be accumulated (the capacity of the hard drive of the laptop I am writing this – 500 Gb), it can be transmitted, processed (I cannot say precisely the power of processor in my laptop). All this could be impossible if information theory were not well developed.
What is the matter – on the one hand, different understanding and discussion of what the information is, on the other – well-developed information theory? The answer is that the quantitative side of information is well-developed, but there is also “other side of the moon” – qualitative side – qualitative information theory.
The founders of quantitative information theory are well known: - Claud Shannon and Norbert Wiener.
It was after publication Claude Shannon’s fundamental work “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” that the concept “information” began to be actively used in various fields of science. However, neither in this work nor in others does Shannon provide a definition of information. The cornerstone of these definitions is the concept of quantity (measure) of information. Shannon notes: “If the set of possible messages is finite then the number of messages can be considered as measure of information created by choosing of one message from this set, assuming that all messages are equally probable” [4, с.244].
Another outstanding American scientist Norbert Wiener in his fundamental work “Cybernetics, or control and communication in the Animal and the Machine” also does not provide a definition of information, limiting himself to listing what is not information. He notes: “The mechanical brain doesn’t secret though, “like the liver secrets bile”, as previous materialists claimed, and does not secrets in the form of energy like muscles. Information is information, not matter and not energy” [5, с.207].
It should be noted that later in his work “Cybernetic and Society” Wiener offers the following definition of information: “Information is the designation of content that we draw from the external world in the process of our adaptation to it and bringing our thinking in the line with it”. However, in this case information is defined through even more vaguer and general concept – “content”.
So, we have to finally state that there is no common developed concept of information, and what is found in the literature is either assigning the status definition of information to the definition of the quantity of information or defining information through other unclear and interrelated definitions such as data, content or refusing to define due to obviousness of what information is. I will give examples of the first and second cases.
D.S. Chernavsky in his work “Synergetic and Information” gives the following definition of information: “Information is remembered choice one of one option from several possible and equal options” [7, с.13].
A.L. Gaponenko gives the following definitions of information in his textbook on knowledge management: “Data is a collection of various objective facts. Information is hierarchical collection of data on certain aspects of the real world. Knowledge is a result of cognition of reality, tested by practice, its correct reflection in human thinking. It is curious if we dig a little deeper and look at the definition of a fact, then a fact is data confirmed by scientific experiment which can be repeated with an invariable result. As they say “the circle is closed”.
But there is also good news – attempts to develop qualitative theory of information have made, and most successful, in my opinion, is the attempt made by polish scientist Marian Mazur. In his monography “Qualitative Theory of Information” he presented a coherent system of ideas and principles defining the fundamental concepts of information and informing. It was precisely his approach, which allowed not only to build coherent system of ideas, but to show the manifestation these ideas in real life that amazed me and inspired me to further research on the base of qualitative theory of information he presented.
Now according to all canon, I must present to the reader the definition of information, developed by Mazur so that he doesn’t bother himself with searching for it on the internet. However, anticipating disappoint, I will say that it will not say much if you do not immerse yourself in qualitative theory of information completely, since it is strict and made at a high level of abstraction. At the same time, it is not the definition of information in itself that is important, but what properties of information it (together with other parts of the theory) allows to study. But still the canon must be respected. So: - “Information is the transformation one message of information association in another message of the same association” [1, с.70].