In the Beginning was Information

paragraph 4.2) play a substitutionary role with regard to reality ora system of thought. Information is always an abstract representationof something quite different. For example, the symbols intoday’s newspaper represent an event which happened yesterday;this event is not contemporaneous, moreover, it might have happenedin another country and is not at all present where and whenthe information is transmitted. The genetic letters in a DNAmolecule represent the amino acids which will only be constructedat a later stage for subsequent incorporation into a protein molecule.The words appearing in a novel represent persons and theiractivities.We can now formulate two fundamental properties of information:Property 1: Information is not the thing itself, neither is it a condition,but it is an abstract representation of material realities or conceptualrelationships, like problem formulations, ideas, programs,or algorithms. The representation is in a suitable coding systemand the realities could be objects, or physical, chemical, or biologicalconditions. The reality being represented, is usually not presentat the time and place of the transfer of information, neither can itbe observed or measured at that moment.Property 2: Information always plays a substitutionary role. Theencoding of reality is a mental process.It is again clear from Property 2 that information cannot be a propertyof matter; it is always an intellectual construct (see theorems1 to 3, paragraph 3.3). An intelligent sender who can abstractlyencode reality, is required.Both the above salient properties now enable us to delineate theinformation concept unambiguously. Figure 15 clearly illustratesthe domains of information (A) and non-information (B and C).Whenever any reality is observed directly by seeing, hearing ormeasuring, then that process falls outside our domain. But whenevera coding system which represents something else is employed,then we are inside our domain A, and then all the mentionedtheorems are completely valid as laws of nature. The following basicdefinition has now been established:84