All information in an information system is real, but reality covers a lot of territory, and may very well be a state of existence that is experienced only by humans. Humans can describe a thing as being real or unreal based on whether that thing is concrete or abstract. If information is concrete, it exists physically in a manner that can be observed or experienced directly through a person's senses, or through a mechanical intermediary to her senses. So we say information is concrete if exists in reality or is directly connected to something real, whereas if information is abstract, it exists in thought. A person cannot apprehend the specific organization of abstract information by sense, or by mechanical intermediary that delivers information to her senses. In other words, a person has no way to prove that abstract information exists. In my opinion, what's abstract exists in reality, but its concrete form is imperceptible, or else we perceive the concrete form as a concept or phenomenon that bears little or no resemblance to its physical constitution.

All mental representations, including signs, can be linked to electrochemical activity in the brain. (Yeah, I realize this is a weak statement 'cause it's unsubstantiated here-- I'll have to justify it later.) But nobody knows exactly what happens to information after it is received by a person's eyes. Although we know a fair amount about the physical structure of the human brain, we don't know the exact processes that transform information in the eyes into information in the brain, and we can't observe how a specific set of information exists in a person's brain. For a person who wants to define significant and/or meaningful abstract information, this is a problem. If a person cannot show how abstract information exists as a tangible, observable form, such as a pattern of elecrochemical activity of a specific selection of neurons in a person's brain, then she will have a difficult time proving that an abstract representations is "real", much less be able to discuss its significance or meaning with any kind of authority. Until someone is able to come up with a way to discern the tangible content of an abstract representation in a person's brain, people who seek to discuss information, significance, and meaning must try to work around this uncharted territory by conceptualizing the possible and eliminating the impossible. For now it is good to note that I have just described what constitutes information, and the forms and conditions by which information can exist. The next part of the page concerns the principles that describe what it is that allows information to exist and behave as it does.

By this point, you may be thinking "this is so general-- everything must be information. Well, this isn't the case. While it seems reasonable that all existing combinations of matter and energy have the potential to be information, they are not actually information unless they are involved in some kind of recognition, and interpretation, or unless they exist in a form that has been purposefully coded to represent something else. So ** is not information unless/until **.

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