[tacticalogic]

Plus your "definition" of information is pretty useless. Its seems a conclusion using your premise is that outside of a specific mind being discussed there is no information. And it would seem that this is not information

The only definition of "information" in play here is that it is an abstraction, which you've already agreed to. It is a mental construct, and it is "information" within any mind that can comprehend it and use it to make that construction. Before that happened, it was not "information".

[LiteKeeper]

According to professor Werner Gitt, Professor Emeritus of Information Technology, there are five properties necessary to have information

• Symbols, whether nucleotides or letters, there are mutually understood.
• Rules for employing those symbols, again mutually agreed upon by sender and receiver
• Meaning associated with the symbols assembled according to the rules, again mutually agreed upon
• Action...elicited by the assembled symbols
• Purpose for the action

[LiteKeeper]

According to professor Werner Gitt, Professor Emeritus of Information Technology, there are five properties necessary to have information

• Symbols, whether nucleotides or letters, there are mutually understood.
• Rules for employing those symbols, again mutually agreed upon by sender and receiver
• Meaning associated with the symbols assembled according to the rules, again mutually agreed upon
• Action...elicited by the assembled symbols
• Purpose for the action

Here is the important part: only a mind can produce those properties. They can not be accounted for by chemistry, nor physics...there is no straight line path from matter to information. This is Polanyi's Impossibility.

[AndrewC]

It is a mental construct, and it is "information" within any mind that can comprehend it and use it to make that construction. Before that happened, it was not "information".

So you too are saying that the plate on voyager presently contains no information?