[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

All of mathematical information theory looks at information independent of meaning.

Could you elaborate, e.g. how can information not have meaning?

[Alamo-Girl]

I've been off digging up articles relevant to the "meaning of information" and have found a few that may be of interest to the lurkers following our discussion:

VII. Mathematics in the Third Millennium? - Chaitin

The conventional view is that matter is primary, and that information, if it exists, emerges from matter. But what if information is primary, and matter is the secondary phenomenon! After all, the same information can have many different material representations in biology, in physics, and in psychology: DNA, RNA; DVD's, videotapes; long-term memory, short-term memory, nerve impulses, hormones. The material representation is irrelevant, what counts is the information itself. The same software can run on many machines.

Information is a really revolutionary new kind of concept, and recognition of this fact is one of the milestones of this age.

Paradoxes, Contradictions, and Solutions (pdf)

What is the physical meaning of information apart from considerations of messages or minds?

From what I've read here and on the message boards it looks like the discussion would probably veer off into Philosophy. Perhaps we don't want to 'go there?'

[Doctor Stochastic]

Information is technical term (primarly in communications engineering) which means the number of possible choices in messages. Whether the message is "meaningful" isn't part of the theory. For example, with 8 bits, one can select 256 different object at most. Errors or noise could reduce this number. There isn't any suggestion that the selected object either exists or is meaningful.

The original papers should be available at Bell Labs.

There's also a book by Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon about the subject.

[js1138]

how can information not have meaning?

Don't watch much daytime TV, do you? I suppose there is a definition of information that forces a tie to meaning, but that presumes a God's eye view. For a child, a soap opera might contain information about how adults behave. For reasonable adults, there is nothing new.

The same discussion could apply to 999 of a thousand books. Or almost everything on the web.