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Lincos language

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Re: Lincos language

#11

Post by paganel »

potiuper wrote: post #6

"It teaches natural numbers by a series of repeated pulses", but receiver would not be able to determine if it was some finite sequence.

Re natural numbers, people in our society (a technicist one) seem to forget that "natural numbers" are actually a social construct, there's nothing "natural" about them, they're not "innate"/"pre-existing" in a Platon-like universe of ideas, they only helped us from some-point on to do some technicist stuff (from collecting taxes in Roman times to sending rockets to the Moon in the 1960s) but I'm not sure that the Universe as a whole "cares" so much about them.

We as a species did have the opportunity at some point in our past of not "choosing" the natural numbers way (and of not choosing the principle of non-contradiction more generally speaking), I'm talking about Heraclitus and presumably some other of his disciples, but we chose not to.

As such, we could "meet" an alien society which has chosen the Heraclitus way, or any other way that doesn't involve "separating" stuff into "units" (like natural numbers are), or of thinking about the Universe as "stuff", or any other idea/concept that is not currently in use by our society. In which case all this trouble would have been for nothing, only helps with our existential solipsism as a species.

Re: Lincos language

#12

Post by 13415 »

I've always been interested in Freudenthal's work, although I've never had the time to work through the book in detail. A second volume was planned but never finished. That's such a pity, because in that volume he planned to formalize interesting social concepts.

Anyway, it's a must read for anyone interested in communication with aliens. I believe it would work, and his way of distinguishing between false and wrong is ingenious. The book is unfortunately hard to get, but there are digital copies around. Good reading if you don't shy away from some old-style Carnap-inspired logic notation.

Re: Lincos language

#13

Post by gus_massa »

paganel wrote: post #11
potiuper wrote: post #6

"It teaches natural numbers by a series of repeated pulses", but receiver would not be able to determine if it was some finite sequence.

Re natural numbers, people in our society (a technicist one) seem to forget that "natural numbers" are actually a social construct, there's nothing "natural" about them, they're not "innate"/"pre-existing" in a Platon-like universe of ideas, they only helped us from some-point on to do some technicist stuff (from collecting taxes in Roman times to sending rockets to the Moon in the 1960s) but I'm not sure that the Un…

They can probably count the stars and the can probably count the Hydrogen atoms. It is a very good guess that they understand the "natural" numbers.

Re: Lincos language

#14

Post by moonchild »

From Gödel, Escher, Bach, chap. 6, Douglas Hofstadter:

> In these examples of decipherment of out-of-context messages, we can separate out fairly clearly three levels of information: (1) the frame message; (2) the outer message; (3) the inner message. The one we are most familiar with is (3), the inner message; it is the message which is supposed to be transmitted: the emotional experiences in music, the phenotype in genetics, the royalty and rites of ancient civilizations in tablets, etc.

> To understand the inner message is to have extracted the meaning intended by the sender.

> The frame message is the message 'I am a message; decode me if you can!'; and it is implicitly conveyed by the gross structural aspects of any information-bearer.

> To understand the frame message is to recognize the need for a decoding-mechanism.

> If the frame message is recognized as such, then attention is switched to level (2), the outer message. This is information, implicitly carried by symbol-patterns and structures in the message, which tells how to decode the inner message.

> To understand the outer message is to build, or know how to build, the correct decoding mechanism for the inner message.

> This outer level is perforce an implicit message, in the sense that the sender cannot ensure that it will be understood. It would be a vain effort to send instructions which tell how to decode the outer message, for they would have to be part of the inner message, which can only be understood once the decoding mechanism has been found. For this reason, the outer message is necessarily a set of triggers, rather than a message which can be revealed by a known decoder.

Re: Lincos language

#15

Post by projektfu »

naringas wrote: post #10
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #7

I've always thought ideas like these to be cool exercises, but ultimately so naive. It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or that an extraterrestrial bei…

> why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? it's also cool to ask why do we? (...follow linear, sequential conversations?)

Yes, there is likely a genetic basis to human language structure, and to expect it to be intelligible by aliens is a big assumption. Very little of our science fiction deals with intelligent but bizarre aliens.

Re: Lincos language

#17

Post by andrewflnr »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #7

I've always thought ideas like these to be cool exercises, but ultimately so naive. It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or that an extraterrestrial bei…

I think it's quite probable that even if some entity or group finds linear sequences of symbols unnatural, if they're smart enough to pick it up they're also smart enough to piece together the meaning the hard way, the same way we would if presented with something very foreign. Any technological entity has encountered and mastered lots of foreign systems, including us. Biochemistry, quantum mechanics, heck, even classical mechanics don't come to humans naturally, but we're getting by pretty well anyway.

As for recognizing life, eh, I don't think it's an accident that we're carbon-based blobs of relatively flexible, mobile matter. If there was a more likely template, that's probably what we would be based on instead.

Re: Lincos language

#18

Post by Lunrtick »

tgb wrote: post #16

Apparently one of my all-time favorite bands is named after the message sent in this message, The Evpatoria Report. I haven't listened to them in a while, so it was a nice reminder seeing this. https://youtu.be/GazWRcrwq-s

Taijin Kyofusho was the first song of theirs I heard - wow. Such a great band!

Re: Lincos language

#19

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #4
feltsense wrote: post #2

I posted this because Alan Kay linked to it in the context of objects that come with their own interpreters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957719 . This was in the same thread where he and Rich Hickey discussed "data": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722 , which was mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23891069 .

That data thread makes me very sad. Two technology leaders completely talking past each other and not understanding the other over and over again.

Well, I believe it only highlights how fundamental definitions of things like "data" aren't even universally agreed upon in our field.
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