Notice how many times you’ve heard this word lately. The brain “processes information.” DNA “stores information.” Some say the universe itself, at its most basic level, “is made of information.” The word is everywhere, used to explain almost anything. And that is exactly what should make us suspicious. A word that explains everything sometimes explains nothing; it only sounds as if it does.
What science actually says
The word “information” has a perfectly precise scientific meaning. In 1948 Claude Shannon defined it mathematically: how much uncertainty drops when a message is received, measured in bits, independent of the medium. That is a solid sense, and it is what runs every phone, every network, every file.
But that sense is narrower than what people mean when they throw the word at the brain or the universe. Shannon’s “information” is a quantity, not a meaning. A completely random sequence carries a great deal of “information” in this sense, more than a meaningful sentence does. When people say “the brain processes information,” they usually mean information that has meaning, and that is exactly what Shannon left out. The two words are identical, the two things are different.
Where it jumps to philosophy
The physicist John Wheeler coined “It from Bit,” the idea that information may be the foundation of reality and matter is derived from it. This is a serious proposal, but it is speculation, not a finding. And here is the trap: when you use “information” to bridge everything, gene to universe, brain to consciousness, it is very easy to think you have understood something, when all you have done is give a new name to the thing you did not understand. A real explanation says how. A name only says what to call it.
What tradition offers
It is interesting that ancient traditions, too, placed something information-like at the foundation of things, and the idea that a word or an utterance precedes matter recurs in more than one. In Genesis it appears as “And God said… and there was.” Not a primal matter, but an utterance. This is not a scientific claim, and it is obviously not information theory in disguise. It is a different language that assumes, like Wheeler, that something abstract, a word, an utterance, a form, precedes matter. We point to the parallel and leave it to you to decide whether it is more than pretty.
Why it touches you
“Information” may be the most important word of the age, and also the vaguest. As long as you don’t distinguish Shannon’s quantity from the meaning we intend, you can build sentences that sound deep and say nothing. One small distinction saves you a great deal of nonsense that sounds clever.
So, a question: when someone tells you “everything, really, is information,” stop a moment and check: do they mean a quantity you can measure, or a meaning no one yet knows how to measure? And which of the two do they think they’ve explained?