In modern theory of communication there is a fundamental believe (1) (2), that is, during a communication there are two things sent through transmission channels from a sender to a receiver, the information and its carrier. The carrier, we now know quite well, are electronic signals flowing along cables and circuits, words written down on papers, voice mediated by open air and so on. But the essence of the information remains somehow as a mysterious thing (2). In my opinion, the concept information in the theoretical framework of communication is, however, not an indispensable constituent part either to the perfection of the communication theory or to the efficiency of any communication system.
My suggestion is:
1. During any communication the only thing that goes through communication channels is not information but its carrier, which may be called more properly as signal.
2. The concept information may be redefined as the effect of received signals on receiver's memory, which may exit only at far end of transmission channel but never in it.
The whole course of a communication could then begin from an event happened in the sender's mind, which produces the original signals, in biochemical or bioelectric form. The signals may travel through nerve system to his motor organs, change there into other form, such as voice, written words or electronic signals, and are transmitted further through certain transmission channel to a receiver. Then through the receiver's sense organ the signals change their form again, come into his mind, and interact there with the receiver's memory (3), which leads to producing of either new signals or new memories. Those new signals or new memories are actually the meaningful things the receiver's mind obtains from the communication, which may be called as information, regarding to its relation with the signals and the memory before their interaction and to its differences from them both.
The communication course described above is composed of 3 changes. There are location changes when signals travel along any biological or non-biological transmission channel and there are form changes when signals changes from one biological form to another or biological forms to non-biological forms or one non-biological form to another. And there are also those called as life changes (3) that always either consume matter and produce energy or consume energy and produce matter. Life changes, as other two changes, may happen not only inside but also outside of human minds. When life changes happen during the interaction between signals and memory, signals may be consumed to produce new memory or memory may be consumed to produce new signals. Therefore, a receiver will not get any information if the received signals do not interact with his memory or the interaction does not lead to life changes. And the same signals may lead to producing of different information in different receiver's mind in which there exists different memory or when the signals interact with different memories stored in the same mind.
Claude E. Shannon's formula I = -log2 P is the basis for many modern theories of information and communication but actually it has not told us anything about the essence of information (4). It has nothing to do with either the location changes during communication or life changes before and after communication, but settled a mathematical relation for any form change between binary digits and other forms of signals, which concerns only with the form changes.
(1) M.J. Usher: Information Theory for Information Technologists, pp. 1-2, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Hong Kong, 1984
(2) J.H.
van Bemmel; M.A. Musen, edi.:
Handbook of Medical Informatics, pp. 25-30, Springer-Verlag,
(3) Xinyan Zhang: The Fundamental Human Conjecture, www.geocities.com/reex9/en.html, Duesseldorf, 2003
(4) Robert M. Losee,
Jr.: The Science of Information, pp. 2-4, Academic Press, Inc.,