X-Message-Number: 26107 Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:25:29 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Interpretation: reply to RBR References: <> This relates to Richard B. Riddick's comments last week. (Yesterday I started looking at Cryonet again after a long absence due to the press of other things, so I am behind in responding.) He said: >And before you reply Mike Perry, I know exactly what you're going >to say: you, in your all-knowing wisdom, have declared only some >interpretive schemes are 'valid' and 'recognized' by the universe, >while others are 'invalid' and 'not recognized'. This position is >at the fringe and you cannot justify it; the mere fact you have to >invoke such extreme metaphysics should be a clue that your system >is built on an unstable foundation. This is in regard to the idea that information is arbitrary because "interpreters"--computer algorithms for example--can crunch it in arbitrary ways and more or less make anything from anything in specific cases--or that's what I think is the issue here. (It has a bearing on whether, for example, we should be comfortable with the idea of repairing the brain for cryonics revival if information derived from one source or another is required.) Of course I am far from "all-knowing" and haven't dichotomized the issue exactly as stated. But I have maintained that, while the interpretation problem exists, not all "interpreters" should be regarded on an equal footing just because they happen to be something runable on a computer or otherwise doable. I don't have a precise characterization of "reasonable" to apply here; but I think a descriptive language could be designed that would be relatively easy to decipher or interpret by reasonable, intelligent folk who were otherwise ignorant of the culture or civilization that produced it. So it would not be proper to characterize messages written in this language--and information more generally--as simply arbitrary. In previous postings I suggested the language might take the form of pictorial images which could be presented in a high-definition format as bit maps, to (at first) show recognizable things like stars, planets, and simple geometric shapes, along with mathematics. Movies encoded this way would be especially informative and easy to recognize by the similarity of successive frames, whose dimensions and pixel word-length would be guessable from the many repetitions. In this way you could construct a general-purpose tutorial, beginning at an elementary level and then going to more advanced topics, which might call for special notation or terminology which could be carefully introduced. This would take a lot of bits overall but would be more straightforward for strangers to understand than our own natural languages, which didn't come into being with the idea of making them as intelligible as possible to outsiders. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26107