Communication occurs if, and only if, information moves from the
input to one process to the output from a second process, the latter
process being the inverse of the first process.
We refer to the information at the output of this inverse, receiving, process, as a
communication. Communication is more complex than information; communication
processes are composed of multiple complementary informative processes.
Here we have two informative processes, the second of which “undoes” what
the first process “does.” Viewed loosely, hearing, for example, undoes what speaking
does. Telephones provide communication circuits, providing an input device
at one end of a connection and an inverse, decoding process at the other end.
Similarly, the language component of a person talking on the telephone may be
said to communicate with the (inverse) language component of the listener. The
knowledge components of the two are in communication.
Using this model of communication, we may define a communication receiver
as the implementation of a function 4 where is referred to as the communication
transmitter.
If the first process merely copies the input to the output, and the inverse process
copies its input to its output, communication is taking place under our model.
This “straight wire” system clearly neither encodes nor decodes, showing an obvious
difference between this model and other models based on encoding and
decoding of messages. None of these three concepts is essential to our model of
communication. We use the communication jargon “encoding” and “decoding” to represent and ! but note that in cases such as the “straight wire” system it
becomes clear that this terminology captures the essence of this copying operation
only weakly, if at