Corominas Murtra, BernatFortuny, JordiSolé Vicente, Ricard, 1962-2015-06-192015-06-192014Corominas Murtra B, Fortuny J, Solé RV. Towards a mathematical theory of meaningful communication. Scientific Reports. 2014;4:4587. DOI: 10.1038/srep045872045-2322http://hdl.handle.net/10230/24546Meaning has been left outside most theoretical approaches to information in biology. Functional responses based on an appropriate interpretation of signals have been replaced by a probabilistic description of correlations between emitted and received symbols. This assumption leads to potential paradoxes, such as the presence of a maximum information associated to a channel that creates completely wrong interpretations of the signals. Game-theoretic models of language evolution and other studies considering embodied communicating agents show that the correct (meaningful) match resulting from agent-agent exchanges is always achieved and natural systems obviously solve the problem correctly. Inspired by the concept of duality of the communicative sign stated by the swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, here we present a complete description of the minimal system necessary to measure the amount of information that is consistently decoded. Several consequences of our developments are investigated, such as the uselessness of a certain amount of information properly transmitted for communication among autonomous agents.application/pdfeng© Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The images in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the image credit; if the image is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the image.Biologia computacionalinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep04587Evolutionary theoryMathematics and computinginfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess