The Definition of Information I thought the aime was to put together a meaningful definition of the term "information" (if possible?)
I assume that the aime should be to define the term as far as possible in such a way that it covers the vague meaning that the word "Information" has in everyday`s language. We think, we know what is meant by statements like: I need more information.
Regardless wether there is a monism of energy, matter and Information or not, it makes no sense to call everything information we may be able to find out about a given object. We may call this complexity or even potential information.
In the same way it makes no sense to refer to everything we already know as information. There are already terms for this: Let´s call it memory or knowledge.
The term "Information" has two aspects, that have not been considered enough so far.
1) The aspect of novelty: A propostion only contains information for us, if we draw new conclusions from it. This is to seperate the term "Information" from the Term "knowledge". But at the same time it does not prevent us from calling "Information" what arises in the moment we become aware of a new idea.
2)The aspect of comprehensibility: A proposition contains information for us, only if we are able to understand it. To do so, it´s semantic elements (what ever this is) must match a part of what we know about the world (or let´s say it´s hypothetical linguistic expression).
I think, there is no sense in trying to determine the amount of potential information contained in a given object in advance. Because the amount of "Information" we may draw from dealing with an object (or a proposition) depends on the way we look at it. Let´s remeber the saying: For the one who´s only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
PS: During the interwar period there was an attempt by members of the "Wiener Kreis" to quantify the semantic content of a message by means of the complexity of it´s syntactical structure. This attempt failed as did theire attempt to find only one of Wittgenstein´s elementary propositions.