In my struggle to understand the meaning of "information" I sometimes despair of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So it was a comfort to come across the opening paragraph of the classic monograph *An Introduction to the Theory of Probability and its Applications, *by William Feller (1950):
"Probability is a mathematical discipline with aims akin to those, for example, of geometry and analytical mechanics. In each field we must carefully distinguish three aspects of the theory: a) The formal logical content, b) the intuitive background, c) the applications. The character, and the charm, of the whole structure cannot be appreciated without considering all three aspects in their proper relation." I was reminded of Claude Shannon's disclaimer that he was not talking about the "meaning" of information when he created communication theory. The word "intuition" in Feller's scheme is as slippery as the word "meaning in Shannon's, but it carries less weighty, less philosophical, and more individual, personal, idiosyncratic, more humane implications. This impression is underscored by the word "charm." I will try to keep Feller's advice in mind in my own thinking about Information. Hans Christian von Baeyer
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