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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25284