People often “blame” Shannon’s theory of #communication for completely ignoring #meaning, maybe also because Shannon himself stated that “the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects“😀

However, if one recognizes that the #information content as defined by the #entropy is the measure of #uncertainty in a receiver about the sender’s #state when producing the message, can it perhaps be interpreted that the receiver is trying to #understand what the sender was #meaning to send?

The information the sender encodes in the message is never the same as that the receiver decodes from it on the other side of the channel.

Below is Shannon’s description of the standard #transducer used for encoding and decoding the information in messages. The block diagrams are my rendering of the description (F is a “#memory” function):