Quantifying Information Content Does Not Bring Meaning From Content

It is perfectly true that redundancy aids recognition of a signal as a language or a code, and this recognition is crucial to SETI. However, Shannon’s method provides only a quantitative measure of the complexity of a language or signaling system—not a translation. And while it is axiomatic in cryptology that redundancy helps in deciphering a text, the task of decipherment/cryptanalysis is to move from an encoded text to the original text—not from text to meaning. To get from text to meaning, we need to understand the language. Put another way, redundancy’s primary function is to reduce noise or permit correction in the case of imperfect transmission; it improves the signal-to-noise ratio but does not provide for the conversion of signal to information.33 And, as Richard Saint-Gelais notes, the conversion of signal to information involves semiotic issues that cannot be bypassed via method.3

We may be able to quantify the information content of an alien signal, but that is very different from deriving the meaning from the signal.