I don’t know why it should make a difference to think of communication this way, since after all, I don’t particularly know aynthing about the current model [of communication.]

But extending the metaphor yields quite a few interesting corollaries: For instance:

Like signal transduction mechanisms in the cell (and by extension, neural circuitry) a few efects must be hard-wired into the system (hammered out by natural selection and thermodynamics, probably). These are akin to primitive instruction sets of a microprocessor: certain effects are inevitable consequences of physics—the interaction [between] elements and the arrangements of the elements themselves. Take for instance the LDA instruction from the 65xx… ([i.e.,] load the accumulator with some value.) This is a consequence of the particular arrangments of the logic gates.

However, effects that are not readily discernable (or at least, effects not in the specs) are possible due to interactions of hard-wired elements (see Gödel, Escher, Bach. Thus, humans are not limited by neural wiring any more than a computer is [limited] to only load and transfer numbers from CPU registers. ([I think I’m trying to explicate the idea of emergence but hadn’t learned the concept yet at this point])