==Do they believe that there is such a thing as “information” absent a sender and a receiver?
I don’t think so. According to Dr. Gitt, information is carried via a physical medium, but the information itself is non-physical. As such, it would seem it is only information to the sender and the receiver.
And indeed, in this, I totally agree with him. The medium is thought to be the EM field. And messages are never physical.
Where I think he may go a bit astray is with his notion of Shannon statistics. He seems to believe these have some bearing on the message itself. That is, he conflates message and medium. Strictly speaking, Shannon statistics have bearing only on the movement of the message through the various stages of the Shannon model. E.g., statistics pertaining to, say, how the "noise" in the channel problem is handled. But these statistics have no bearing whatsoever on the content of the message. It is what it is, first and last. Shannon theory has no input whatsoever at the level of the message itself.
The transmission channel does not recognize the message, the information, it conveys. Its job is simply to facilitate the transmission of messages. Only the senders and receivers recognize the transmission as information.
In short, for some reason it seems Dr. Gitt has conflated "medium" and "message" in his model. Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thank you so much for writing, GGG!