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

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