As cognitive agents, we inform ourselves about the world and we use that information to control our behavior. We also report information to others, as I am doing in this blog post. This post is part of a series on my own philosophy. It will mainly be about the meaning of the word “information” as I use it when discussing cognition.
Shannon information
I shall be using “information” to refer to what is often called Shannon Information, after the work of Claude Shannon. The term “Shannon Information” has come to mean information in the form of a structured sequence of symbols, such as a natural language sentence or a data transmission stream on the Internet. Shannon’s own research was not limited to the use of transmission in discrete units (such as words or bits), but its main use is with discrete units.
Shannon information is often criticized as being an entirely syntactic view of information. Shannon was concerned with communication, with getting the stream of discrete symbols from the source to the destination. His theory is not concerned with issues of meaning or semantics.
The Heretical Philosopher 