9 Summary and Conclusions
A satisfactory definition of communication should describe the phenomenon of
interest. A better model will both describe existing events and predict the characteristics
of future communications. The best definitions would help explain what
is occurring, as well as allow us to describe and predict. The model of communication
as complementary informative processes is based on a set of requirements
for a definition of communication and a precise definition of information. The precision
in this model of information, combined with the precision of the definition
of communication, allows us to state explicitly what is and what isn’t information
and what is and what isn’t communication. One may then define a communication
as what is transmitted from the beginning of one process to the output of a process
with the inverse functionality of the first process.
Most phenomena referred to in the form “X to X communication,” such as
“human to human communication” or “machine to machine communication,” are
communication under our definition of communication. These expressions imply
communication between the same levels of two different hierarchies, or, more formally,
between a function 4 and its inverse !L Defining communication as
two complementary processes allows us to both predict what will happen in the
presence of noise or the failure of functions to be exact inverses. One can also understand
the human aspects of communication, as well as the low level biological
and physical phenomena such as speech or hearing and the physical transmission
of sound through the atmosphere or the transmission of words through the movement
of written pages.