# The Central Dogma of Information
## 2 [PERSON]'s Communication Theory: A Critical Appraisal  
Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the elements of the general communication system underlying the Mathematical Theory of Communication [29], central to the establishment of 'Information Theory' as a discipline. The information source 'produces a message or sequence of messages to be communicated to the receiving terminal'. The transmitter 'operates on the message in some way to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel'. For example, 'in telegraphy we have an encoding operation which produces a sequence of dots, dashes and spaces on the channel corresponding to the channel'. The channel is the 'the medium used to transmit the signal from transmitter to receiver', which accumulates noise from multiple sources in its path, some predictable, some not. The receiver 'performs the inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, reconstructing the message from the signal'. Finally, the destination 'is the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended'. The fundamental problem of communication is defined as 'that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point' [29]. Though the messages may be syntactically crafted to have meaning, these semantic or meaningful aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem, though in some instances the engineering aspects may reveal or imply semantic content. This communications system can be mathematically analyzed in detail, incorporating probabilistic prediction, in the effort to recognize the originally sent message from all possible messages that could have been sent. [PERSON]'s purpose in devising this analysis was to understand and solve the problem of communication from an engineering perspective, emphasizing the syntactical aspects of communication. The syntactical aspects refer only to the potential ordering of the transmitted messages according to the rules of syntax or syntactics. The impact of these developments on digital communications is everywhere to be seen. If we are to naturalize the process of communication, we might ask if there are missing elements that would merit inclusion for a more comprehensive analysis. For example, how does the sender of the message come up with the message that is to be coded for transmission? What is the historical and technical process that allows humans to develop the technology, design, build and use the apparatus that allows communication to take place? More fundamentally, how do humans come to be in a position not only to produce advanced technological developments, but to be able to express themselves to take advantage of their use? Phylogenetically, it is not too long ago that we were living a hand-to-mouth existence where communication was at best by signs and/or direct oral communication. Ontogenetically, we develop from a state in which we can hardly communicate to a state in which oral communication is second nature to us. These questions seem relevant if we are to understand information from a more general perspective. Not having ready answers to these questions suggests that we may suffer from alienation, or an inability to recognize our handiwork in the products of our labor. It is easy to forget that our handiwork created the described communication system that we are describing. Further, there is a human being at the left-end and right-end of the communication system in Figure 1. The human being at the left-end generates a message, the result of an internal or endogenous process of creation of semantic information or information that has meaning for her, codes it as external or exogenous syntactic information in the form of speech, which the communication apparatus subsequently digitally codes as syntactic information and sends to the human being at the right-end. After the digitized message acquires noise in the channel, it is denoised and decoded in the receiver to become synthesized speech, which reaches the ears of the human being at the right-end.