Total Information Transmission between Autonomous Agents

This note explores the current framework of information theory to quantify the amount of semantic content of a given message is sent in a given communicative exchange. Meaning issues have been out of the mainstream of information theory since its foundation. However, in spite of the enormous success of the theory, recent advances on the study of the emergence of shared codes in communities of autonomous agents revealed that the issue of meaningful transmission cannot be easily avoided and needs a general framework. This is due to the absence of designer/engineer and the presence of functional/semantic pressures within the process of shaping new codes or languages. To overcome this issue, we demonstrate that the classical Shannon framework can be expanded to accommodate a minimal explicit incorporation of meaning within the communicative exchange.