Xinyan Zhang
24.12.2003
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 or pictures shown on TV screens. But the essence of the information remains somehow a mysterious thing (2). In my opinion, the information in this framework is, however, not an indispensable constituent part either to the perfection of the communication theory or to the efficiency of any communication system.
I would suggest:
1. Only one thing is send from sender to receiver during any communication, which is not the information but only the carrier. Then the name carrier is here no more suitable and I will use the word signal to call anything that is sent through transmission channels during any communication in the rest part of this essay.
2. The concept information may be redefined as the products from the interaction between received signals and the receiver's memory.
The whole course of a communication would then begin from an event happened in the sender's mind, which produces the original signals, in biochemical or bioelectric form. The signals 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 an 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 much of the modern theories of information and communication but actually it has nothing to do with either the essence of information (4) or location and life changes in any communication. It only concerns with the form changes. And it settled a mathematical relation for any form change between binary digits and other forms of signals.
(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,
Heidelberg, 1997
(3) Xinyan Zhang: The Fundamental Human Conjecture, http://home.t-online.de/home/x.y.z/en.html, Duesseldorf, 2003
(4) Robert M. Losee, Jr.: The Science of Information, pp. 2-4, Academic Press, Inc., London, 1990
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