On the Possibility of communication without life. It is possible without carbon? without moderate temperatures or without the earth’s magnetic field? What about the atomic cohesiveness of matter?

To believe It occurs only when a difference of utterance and information is understood, one must grasps a distinction between the information value of its content and the reasons for which the content was uttered.

One must be able to assume that the information is not self-understood but requires a separate decision.

So what about the separation of communication from biology? In principle, communication is not bound to life as such.

Biological systems create their own forms of complexity, yet communication is a closed operation of selections and couplings, an autopoietic order that can, in theory, be independent of living matter.

Machines, for instance, can select utterances and process signs. ones and zeros.

But for us, communication only becomes visible through coupling with life, through the weight of memory, habit, thought, and meaning: reaction.

What life provides is not communication itself, but the surplus of association, context, and embodied nuance.

Without it, communication is only repetition, mere mechanics without resonance.

Consciousness is a necessary partner to communication, but also its limit.

Perceptions cannot be shared directly.

They must be externalized as utterances, distinguished as selections, and taken up into the system of communication.

Thus perception alone does not suffice; it is only when perception is risked into utterance, and that utterance is taken up as information, that communication occurs.

But that means communication always contains the possibility of failure. We have all failed to be understood and misunderstanding is not an accident of communication, it is its structural companion.

Every utterance forces a distinction, bifurcating reality into “yes” and “no.”

And because the reasons for this distinction are opaque, every communication risks mistrust, distortion, or collapse.

I ask myself if an intrinsic mistrust or arrogance of the Id, this bifurcating, is that’s what communication is made of? What does it mean to be heard or unheard?

Mistrust is not the enemy of communication but its foundation.

Because every utterance forces a distinction, communication always risks doubt.

Mistrust, that’s what communication is made of.

Trust appears only as a fragile resolution of this underlying suspicion, a temporary stabilization of uncertainty.

To speak is already to risk mistrust, and to risk mistrust is what makes speech meaningful.

“When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.”

If communication always presupposes selection and understanding, what happens when selection occurs under an alien logic? We must consider the possibility that signals may be sent yet never received, or received yet never understood.

Here, the very structure of communication exposes its fragility.

If the alien probe sends a message we cannot even detect, or if it is the terrestrial probe's message that cannot be detected by the alien probe, this is, according to Bosco et al. (2006) a Type I Communication failure.

If the alien probe detects our signal but does not understand our message, the communication cannot be continued under this condition of non-understanding.

If the terrestrial probe does not understand the message from the alien probe, communication cannot proceed any further either.

This is a failure of communication, but it is a failure of communication within the communication itself. This is what we call Type II Communication Failure.

Thus, failure is not external to communication but internal to it.

Every communicative act forces a split.

By uttering, the system produces both a “yes” version and a “no” version of reality.

It bifurcates the world, compelling selection.

Communication bifurcates reality.

It creates two versions, a yes version and a no version, and thereby forces selection.

Thus, communication is not merely exchange but decision.

Every message produces an alternative — and therefore the risk of failure.

Look at Luhmann’s radical position: There are no building blocks of communication that exist independently and only need to be assembled by someone (a subject, perhaps? Consciousness?).

Communication needs to access perception.

It must rely on utterances, which are always selective, always excluding as much as they include.

Perception remains opaque, enclosed within the subject, while communication works only with what is externalized.

The closure of meaning is therefore double: within consciousness, and within the communication system.

Instead it is a matter of different selections whose selectivity and selective domain are constituted by the communication itself.

There is no information outside of communication, no utterance outside of communication, no understanding outside of communication, and not simply in the causal sense for which information is the cause of the utterance and the utterance the cause of the understanding, but rather in the circular sense of reciprocal presupposition.

Thus, every communicative act presupposes its own possibility.

What cannot be taken up by communication simply does not exist within it.

Only communication produces communication.