Definition and classification of information in relation to its carriers.

What is it about?

The paper discusses the notion of information with regard to its carriers, representatives (or structural carriers) and carried-related processes of transmission, accumulation and processing through the developmental periods of the inorganic and organic world. In the first period, information is contained in a representation of the outcome of physical, chemical and other processes in the physical, chemical and other structures of the non-living world and refers to environmental information. In the second period, information begins to be used to create the physical and chemical structures of the living world and is contained in instructions of the genetic code. In the third period, with the evolution of cognitive systems and intelligence of living beings, in addition to those listed, information is finally being used to build its own structures, which in this paper are called knowledge structures.

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Why is it important?

Knowledge structures are such structures that are literally composed of information about other types of structures (physical, chemical, etc.) which, because they are not physical and chemical structures but only their representations, are necessarily coded. Based on this, knowledge structures must initially rest on an additional, structural carrier of information. It would not be wrong to say that knowledge structures are essentially semiotic, in other words, structures that are always mediated by signs. What can be physical in any sense of that word are information carriers (atoms, molecules, genes, matter, energy) and information representatives (signals, genes, signs in non-changeable knowledge structures, etc.), not the information itself.

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