Information
Definition
A Definition of Information, by Marcia Bates:
"We know that we are continually subjected to a huge range of sensory input and internal experience of sensations and thoughts. In fact, almost anything existing in the universe, that can come into human and other animals’ purview, can be experienced as information — a bird call, our friend’s "Hello", the rock we trip over, the intuition we have about the honesty of someone we are talking to, a book we read.
The definition of information used here, therefore, goes to the very basis of any living being’s awareness:
Information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy.
Though this definition is quoted from Edwin Parker (1974, p. 10), this approach to the concept was endemic at the time. Parker does not elaborate his definition, and no more recent theoretical development of this approach to information has been found. I believe this definition has much undeveloped potential. Information is the pattern of organization of the matter of rocks, of the earth, of plants, of animal bodies or of brain matter. Information is also the pattern of organization of the energy of my speech as it moves the air, or of the earth as it moves in an earthquake. Indeed, the only thing in the universe that does not contain information is total entropy; that alone is pattern-free. Because human beings can potentially act on or be influenced by virtually any imaginable information in the universe, if we want a truly fundamental and broadly applicable definition of information for our discipline, we must begin with one just this broad in meaning and application."
(https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/NatRep_info_11m_050514.html)
More information
- Source of the definition: Bates, Marcia J. "Fundamental Forms of Information,"
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8) (2006): 1033-1045.