Douglas S. answered • 4d
10+ Years Experience Teaching History, Philosophy, and Writing (PhD)
I found it surprising no one has answered this question and the inquirer has been left hanging for four years! There are various ways to parse the question "what is information?" but the most noticeable feature of the word 'information' is 'form'. Form was Plato's answer to what true reality is, the real and unchangeable essence of something, and understanding why the word 'form' occurs in the word 'information' helps explain what information is, so we need to go back to Ancient Greece here.
Plato distinguished an immaterial form of things from the various material differences in which they can be embodied. For example, the human soul (stable immaterial form) is roughly the same in all humans, but the bodies that "house" those souls are all different shapes, sizes, and colors. Dogs all have four legs, but come in different sizes and colors and shapes. Plato thought the form was more important for figuring out what things were than the matter in which they came, so he urged studying formal features of things over their material differences. So one way to think about information is that it is that which puts the "form," or true meaning of something, "inside" your head: information informs you of the true meaning of things.
This is merely scratching the surface, however. For more information on the nature of information, see Fred Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information and the recent article on information in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
