Shannon's model, for instance, does not require bits to be binary or digital. The model has been quite effective in molecular biology (cancer research and pharmaceuticals) where the message is in Genetic Code and the sender/receiver are molecular machinery.
Information in Shannon's model is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver (or molecular machine) as it moves from a before state to an after state. The model entails these specific elements: message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, receiver, decoding.
I cannot accept the use of term "information" in an application where all these elements do not exist, e.g. when it means no more than determinism or physical causation.
Again, information is the successful communication of a message not the message itself. It doesn't matter what the message "is."
EPR is strictly deterministic. Information cannot occur via EPR simply because the sender cannot encode a message by measurement (the No Cloning Theorem.) The sender has no control over the outcome of the measurement to encode a message for the receiver, Lorenz frames (No Communication Theorem) notwithstanding!
By the way, Rosen extended Shannon's model for biological systems to a circular model. It's very promising. If you're interested, pick up a copy of "Life Itself."
Really. I so agree. I really can't see any extension of the idea of "information" to non-living systems in nature. Non-living systems are captives of the deterministic physical laws, especially the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
What makes living systems different, is their sustained defiance of the second law, maintaining maximal distance from its effects for as long as possible. They need "information" to do that. And as Shannon correctly notes (it seems to me), it is only successful communication — understood as the reduction of uncertainty in the hands of the receiver, not primarily the content of the message itself — that can accomplish this. (Not to say the content is not important. Only to say the content could be, say, the Declaration of Independence itself which, if not successfully communicated, would have no effect on the receiver of the communication.)
Well 'nuff for now. Time to sleep.
Good night to you, dearest sister in Christ — and to all a good night!
We must agree to disagree. A definition of "information" as content-less [or content free] and nothing more than what "communication" delivers puts the epistemological cart before the horse, and is really unworthy of any serious consideration.
Counterexamples abound, including the transmission of random noise or counterfactual content, which your definition requires us to call "information" [neither of these things is, outside of an extraordinarily narrow context.]
The reductio ad absurdum of your belief is that neither mathematical proof nor scientific discovery actually produces information, and that indeed, there is no source of any original information except for a supernatural [and unscientific] cause; which is where the real misappropriation occurs in this discussion. But I am not going to get into this in detail because I'm not interested in such a silly definition. My tagline applies to what you consider to be "information."