Communication is a complex process. The main reason is that regular humans, like me, are unable to transmit actual thoughts, but instead are confined to transmitting only presentations of these thoughts.

For example, suppose I am sick and I mean to transfer this information to you. I cannot just implant this knowledge in you, but rather I first put it in words: "I am sick". I cannot just give you these words, but I speak them to you. Actually, I cannot even just speak them directly but I first transform them in some signals I send to my vocal chords, and based on these signals vocal chords produce some vibrations that we call sound.

The actual information gets transformed in several steps until it eventually reaches a form that can be transfered to the audience. When the presentation reaches the audience the inverse process happens: the presentation is successively transformed until a representation is extracted from it.

From our example, the vibrations will reach your ear, and the ear will transform this into some signals sent to your brain. Some more processing is performed and words are recognized. Afterwords, the totality of words is processed, and then the information gets extracted, and you will understand that I am sick. Hopefully.

Even a slight problem along the way can cause miscommunication. For example, maybe my throat was dry and sounds did not come out right, or maybe due to the overall noise you might have only heard "I am si" and because of other factors you might conclude I said "I am silly".

While what I described is a brief summary of a rather complicated process, it is not the part that poses the grandest challenge. More problematic is the way we use these physical mechanisms of producing, transmitting and receiving data.

In our example, "I am sick" is a simple sentence, but what it tries to formulate is not as simple. "I am sick" is a gross approximation of what I think about my actual condition. I can be sick because I have a fever, I can be sick because I am traveling with a speeding train, or I can just be sick of it all. I can be sick in many ways, yet I just aim to transmit an abstract view of it. This is the first challenge: what to transmit, and how to do it.

Choosing what is important and put it in a transmittable form is complex, but it is still does not represent the complete story. A further challenge consists of recovering the meaning from the signals that reach us. Although when we create a presentation we see the mapping to the meaning as obvious, when it comes to recovering this meaning, it is no longer as straightforward. When you hear that I am sick, you get to choose the meaning behind, and this choice might not be quite the same as I intended it.

Communication is challenging and we should recognize it as such.