X-Message-Number: 25284
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 23:49:41 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Information and meaning

Richard has said, in reference to records or chunks of information, that 
"these arrangements do not possess an objective interpretation, as the word 
'record' might suggest," and more generally has denied that information can 
have intrinsic meaning. I have challenged this, with my example of a movie 
encoded in a format that should be guessable by intelligent aliens, and I 
stand by my challenge, even though he has brushed aside this argument as 
"hand-waving." Another, simpler example of intrinsic meaning would be a 
record that started with, say the first 100 prime numbers in an easily 
recognizable format. We might use a unary format for this, each number a 
string of 1's followed by 0, so it would start like this: 
110111011111011111110   . This would be easily recognizable as the sequence 
of prime numbers, even though many other interpretations would be possible. 
Thus, interpreting them as Fibonacci numbers would be possible, but this 
would be an unnatural interpretation and would not change the fact that we 
are representing the primes, which ought to be fairly evident. From there 
we could go on to express other ideas in simple, guessable ways, making 
sure we applied a simple set of formatting rules or conventions 
consistently, over and over, for a record that reached a substantial 
length. We could thus describe objects or entities or concepts of 
considerable complexity. If we credit our aliens with intelligence and 
curiosity, it is reasonable to suppose they would correctly decipher our 
record.

Best to all,
Mike Perry

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