Gitt on Information and Its Material Medium

Professor Werner Gitt of Germany is an expert in the field of information science. On pages 85 and 86 of his book "In the Beginning was Information" (CLV) he argues that although information requires a material medium, it is nevertheless distinct from matter:

Theorem 24: Information requires a material medium for storage.

If one writes some information with chalk on a blackboard, the chalk is the material carrier. If it is wiped off, the total quantity of chalk is still there, but the information has vanished. In this case the chalk was a suitable material medium, but the essential aspect was the actual arrangement of the particles of the chalk. And this arrangement was definitely not random, it had a mental origin. The same information that was written on the blackboard, could also have been written on a magnetic diskette. Certain tracks of the diskette then became magnetised, and also in this case there is a carrier for the information as stated by Theorem 24. The quantity of material involved is appreciably less than for the chalk and blackboard, but the amount of material is not crucial. Moreover, the information is independent of the chemical composition of the storage medium. If large neon letter signs are used for displaying the same information, then the amount of material required, is increased by several orders of magnitude.

So his basic argument here is that, because the same information can be stored on different physical mediums, with differing quantities of material and chemical composition, it follows that information is distinct from the matter in which it is stored.

This point is significant, not only for information theory, but also for philosophy. For it indicates that there is something (information) which is essentially distinct from matter. This disagrees with philosophical materialism, which holds that matter is the only thing which can be shown to exist.