Beautiful to look at, easy on the eyes. The actual mathematical formula....
Shannon himself said that his theory doesn't account for the meaning of the message. He wrote "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem" (p. 32). But, I do want to talk about the meaning of messages because there are so many signals carrying messages that we receive in some way, shape, or form that I wonder we aren't tore apart from the non-stop barrage.
Messages from the brain to the body particularly interest me, inside messages, kind of muddy. My brain has lately begun to tell my body that it hurts. It sends out random signals to the toes on my left foot or my right shoulder, to the lower back, to my skin all over. No corresponding action having originated at the point of pain, though (i.e., I didn't smash my toe or my shoulder, scratch my skin). They tell me it is fibromyalgia, an auto-immune disorder, but the more I study it the more I don't understand what my brain is actually telling me. Is there some noise in the channel corrupting the actual message? What if instead of pain I am suppose to feel something else? Can we hijack the signal and re-write the message?
There are outside messages that are very clear--a handwritten note, a hungry yowl from a cat, someone talking to you--but I have no idea who or where the sender is. One morning I heard my name shouted, clear as day. Woke me from a dead sleep, even startled the cat laying next to me on the bed. He looked down the hall, ears perked up. I looked down the hall, eyes wide open. No one in the house but us.
Sometimes the message isn't heard or seen, just felt. Or, heard, seen, and felt through some other sense. I think sometimes those are what dreams are --some kind of weird messages. Dreaming has never been a problem for me. I remember dreams from childhood, clear as day. Sometimes I would have 'waking' dreams, often in the morning--lucid dreaming, think they call it? I would wake up, grab some coffee, sit and wait for the caffeine to take, and see stories, images, mostly nonsensical stuff that I assume was my brain clearing out the debris.
A while back I was in Tallahassee, at FSU, working on my doctorate. Not finished, but in that writing stage, crunching data, trying to make sense of it all. It is a strange phase of one's life, a time of a little craziness. (This was before I took the type of meds of I take now for depression, anxiety, insomnia so my brain was raw, on edge, prone to periods of intense sadness, happiness, hyper-vigilance, creativity.) I had banished the television and while I had Internet access I wasn't prone to surfing the web aimlessly so I wasn't online. I was in a self-imposed exile, in a way. I would sleep a little, write a little, sleep, write. Sometimes in a state of not quite asleep and not quite awake. Things were blurry. I had one mission.... to write, write, write.
One morning I sat there zombie-tapping on my laptop, trying to finish a sentence started the night before and I suddenly felt a powerful urgency to get out of the house. Had to get out. "Get out!" it said. I looked up and the roof was collapsing, right over my desk. I ran from my crappy little duplex, leaving everything behind. When I came back in I saw that there was all my stuff ruined, my laptop in pieces, and I could see the sky through the ceiling, as if something had blasted its way through. There was a fine, white dust covering everything, still floating in the air, choking me, making my eyes water. I remember thinking, where the hell did all the dust come from?
Yes, I was dreaming. The ceiling hadn't collapsed, my laptop was fine, and there was no white, powdery dust covering everything. It hadn't happened, but that powerful urge to run, someone telling me to get out...that had been real.
Later that morning I was sitting on the couch, reading, waiting for the mail because I had ordered something and desperately wanted it to arrive. It was about 11am in the morning and I was thinking of going back to sleep. I heard my neighbor's door open and then pounding on my door--loud and fast. When I opened the door he was standing there all excited and kind of scary---he was a big, bearded guy--and he was yelling "We're under attack!" Had no idea what he was talking about. A plane, he explained. A plane had hit the Twin towers in New York.
Spent most of the day at some friend's house, a married couple, who had a huge television--rear-projector, big boxy thing. I remember it because they gave it to me a few years later. The CNN logo was burned on the the screen in the lower-right corner. We had watch CNN all day, watched the chaos, the planes hitting the towers over and over again, the massive smoke lifting up to the sky, watched the people jumping or falling from the buildings, watched people running across the bridges, running from Manhattan. News reporters talking non-stop, reporting on the Pentagon hit, the plane down in Pennsylvania. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.
That day seared in my brain, like the CNN logo on the tv screen. What I remember most clearly is the dust....the white powdery dust rolling through the streets, covering everyone, making them ghosts. It was the concrete from the ruined buildings, and, I assume, the ashes of those who had died in the fires. It was just like what I saw that morning, in that lucid vision-y dream thing.
As I read over this I realize it is so overly dramatic. But, it is a true account of my experience on that morning. Every time I think about Shannon's model I think about it. I think Shannon would say, you got a message, pure and simple. It was sent to no one in particular, you just happened to have your head in the right channel at the right time (high probability?) to receive it. What exactly is the meaning I am supposed to take away from it? Because, for all intents and purposes, it can be interpreted so many ways. There was nothing I could do to help any of those people, no message I could send to prevent any of it because from my calculations I heard it at the exact same time the first plane hit the tower. What was the point of it?
I can only speculate that sometimes a whole bunch of people send the same message and it is amplified, jacked up, and sent out across some weird frequency. You can't help but receive it, can't help but get the message.
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