Because the practical utility of information does not require any understanding of its nature, we tend to ignore the question of what information truly is (the nature of consciousness shares a similar fate). Maybe it has something to do with my computer science background, but I’ve been wondering about the fundamental nature of information for quite some time. I think it’s actually one of the most mysterious things that we typically take for granted.

When we think of information, we commonly think of data, contained in things like books, music, images, videos. But what exactly is inside these containers? We can abstract the various forms of containers as collections of bits. In fact, we do this everyday, as almost all information we encounter these days are digitized inside computers. But the bits that encode a book is not the entirety of the information contained in the book, since we’d also have to know how to decode the book, from bits to text, then from text to meaning. After all, the encoded binary data of a German book contains no information to me, since I cannot read bits nor German.

So then information is not just the the collection of bits that encode the data, but also the context around the data. There is an explicit mapping action involved, of context to encoding, in order to retrieve the information. The context with which the meaning is mapped is as essential as the actual encoded data, and it is ultimately rooted in our physical reality. For example, the information of “apple” is not just the 5 letters of the word, but also the understanding of the meaning. And if we trace it all the way to the end, it ends with an actual apple in the world, being mapped to the characters that form the word “apple”.

With the active mapping being an integral part of what constitutes information, it seems that information, whatever it is, cannot exist on its own, independent of any observers¹. Without the observer to perform the action of interpretation, using the same context as the original creator, we can’t really call the encoded data “information”. Note however, that in everyday language we are much more lax in our usage of the term “information”. For example, when we say that “this hard drive has many PDFs containing a lot of information”, we are taking for granted (i.e. ignoring):

• The ability to read the orientation of the magnetic bits on the spinning disk (external context of hard drive specifications)
• The ability decode that binary data as PDFs (external context of the PDF file format standard)
• The ability to understand the decoded PDFs (external context of language, picture comprehension, etc…), which implies an observer with this knowledge

Information theory encapsulates this idea that information, due to its very nature, requires an observer, by tying information together with communication. In fact, the entire field of information theory primarily studies the communication, or transmission, of information, across time and space. Communication, in more abstract terms, can be seen as the action (or at least attempt) to synchronize states between two parties. Following this line of thinking, information then, in a way, is the mechanism that facilitates further state synchronizations between two parties, based on previous, partially synchronized states (i.e. the shared context of interpretation).