What’s information, for an organism or intelligent machine? How can a machine or organism mean?

Words and phrases referring to information are now used in many scientific and nonscientific academic disciplines and in many forms of engineering. This chapter suggests that this is a result of increasingly wide-spread, though often implicit, acknowledgement that besides matter and energy the universe contains information (including information about matter, energy and information) and many of the things that happen, including especially happenings produced by living organisms, and more recently processes in computers, involve information-processing. It is argued that the concept “information” can no more be defined explicitly in terms of simpler concepts than any of the other deep theoretical concepts of science can, including “matter” and “energy”. Instead the meanings of the words and phrases referring to such things are defined implicitly in part by the structure of the theories in which they occur, and in part by the way those theories are tested and used in practical applications. This is true of all deep theoretical concepts of science. It can also be argued that many of the pre-scientific concepts developed by humans (including very young humans) in the process of coming to understand their environment are also implicitly defined by their role in the theories being developed. A similar claim can be made about other intelligent animals, and future robots. An outline of a theory about the processes and mechanisms various kinds of information can be involved in is presented as partial implicit definition of “information”. However there is still much work to be done including investigation of varieties of information processing in organisms and other machines.