In the Beginning was Information

At this stage we want to point out a fundamental fallacy that hasalready caused many misunderstandings and has led to seriouslyerroneous conclusions, namely the assumption that information is amaterial phenomenon. The philosophy of materialism is fundamentallypredisposed to relegate information to the material domain, asis apparent from philosophical articles emanating from the formerDDR (East Germany) [S8 for example]. But even so, the formerEast German scientist J. Peil [P2] writes: “Even the biology basedon a materialistic philosophy, which discarded all vitalistic andmetaphysical components, did not readily accept the reduction ofbiology to physics ... Information is neither a physical nor a chemicalprinciple like energy and matter, even though the latter arerequired as carriers.”Also according to a frequently quoted statement by the Americanmathematician Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964) information cannotbe a physical entity [W5]: “Information is information, neithermatter nor energy. Any materialism which disregards this, will notsurvive one day.”Werner Strombach, a German information scientist of Dortmund[S12], emphasises the nonmaterial nature of information by definingit as an “enfolding of order at the level of contemplative cognition”.The German biologist G. Osche [O3] sketches the unsuitability ofShannon’s theory from a biological viewpoint, and also emphasisesthe nonmaterial nature of information: “While matter and energyare the concerns of physics, the description of biological phenomenatypically involves information in a functional capacity. In cyberneticsthe general information concept quantitatively expresses theinformation content of a given set of symbols by employingthe probability distribution of all possible permutations of the symbols.But the information content of biological systems (geneticinformation) is concerned with its ‘value’ and its ‘functional meaning’,and thus with the semantic aspect of information, with itsquality.”Hans-Joachim Flechtner, a German cyberneticist, referred to thefact that information is of a mental nature, both because of its con-46