And it is very problematic for the position of psychological continuity for the reasons given; the line is arbitrary, yet important, and further yet: unknowable. — Mijin

Assuming psychological continuity is correct, it is up to you to draw the line. If you believe that any degree of survival counts as survival of the original, then if Napoleon came out of the teleporter, and he had the faintest, most fleeting and occasional memory of the teleportee, well then for you that is full survival. But that is just your personal judgement: you are treating a continuous property as a binary, and you are free to designate any line you wish. But however you draw the line, the reality is that in this case the teleportee survived only to an infinitesimal degree.

Again, I think I personally believe in bodily continuity at this point. But, the imperfect teleporter does not refute psychological continuity. That conclusion relies on treating something that is continuous, psychological survival, as a binary.

I think the key for my objection (its not really an objection proper) is that the concept of survival is a 1 or 0. — AmadeusD

You are thinking in terms of bodily survival. But the core of this question is which type of survival is relevant for personal continuity: bodily, or psychological?

Survival is only a 1 or 0 if we are talking about bodily survival. Either the heart is still beating, or it has stopped forever.

This is not how psychological survival works. Here the full range from 0 to 1 is possible. Think of someone in a complete vegetative coma. The body is still alive, it survives, this is a 1. But the mind is gone, a 0. Call the healthy state, before whatever illness or accident caused a coma, a 1. Between that there is a full spectrum between psychic wholeness and psychic death. If you have ever witnessed someone's descent into dementia this reality would be painfully apparent. As dementia progresses, bits and pieces are taken away from the victim, until there is nothing left.

Of course, in reality bodily integrity has the same continuity. The body undergoes degrees of degradation, it doesn't just stop working one day. But we are so attuned to the divide between life and death that we think of it as binary. The line between awareness of any kind, and vegetative unconsciousness, just isn't as salient for us, so we don't have an equivalent binary conception of psychological survival.

. If what you mean is that not all of you survives that's quite a different claim and might bear some clarification. — AmadeusD

Why is "not all of you survives" "quite a different claim" from "part of you survives"?

This is the line we're interested in in the imperfect transporter. Where is that line: how does the universe decide, and how can we know where it is? — Mijin

We both know there is no line.

You want to say, in the imperfect transporter, if survival is possible at all, there must be a line between survival and death, as death is surely possible given enough imperfection. There is no such line, any such line must be arbitrary. Therefore survival isn't possible.

But this is only true if survival is binary. If we think of survival in terms of a body living or dying, it is binary. If we think in terms of a soul transmigrating or not, it is binary. But if we think in terms of psychological survival (which is the only way anyone can survive a transporter) it is not. Survival in this case is a continuum between 0-1, not a binary on-off.

That is why I keep returning to injury, such as stroke. In a stroke, while your body might survive, in a psychological sense, your mind may only partially survive. You may lose aspects of your cognition, abilities, personality, memory, and feelings, and in a very visceral sense you may feel discontinuous with your prior self. But not necessarily fully discontinuous, the discontinuity lies on a spectrum. And so partial survival is not some abstract construct, it is already part of everyday reality.

In this context, "partial" could only be mapped to saying: yes, you survive, and that the nature of your consciousness depends on the nature of the damage. The problem is, this is implicitly saying that I am always transported. So, if Abraham Lincoln walks out at Destination, I'm surviving through his eyes, despite the only association between me and him being that some person claimed the transporter would send me. — Mijin

No. You are yet again talking from your implicit soul perspective, where "instance of consciousness" is your word for soul. Assuming psychological continuity is key, you survive only to the degree that the new person's psychology resembles the old. Abraham Lincolns would not resemble it at all, so you would be completely extinguished.

But your position seems to be that psychological continuity is key, right? So in your view, is that person still alive? — Mijin

I'm not so sure anymore, I'm moving away from that toward the bodily continuity camp. The kind of argument that is swaying me: suppose the original wasn't dematerialized, by accident. The original would have no clue what was going on with the teleported person. From the original's perspective, the copy is a completely separate person that just so happens to resemble them, like a supremely close identical twin. Then, the mistake is realized, and the original is subsequently killed. Why should killing the the original change that the copy is a separate person?

2. (The more correct description IMO) That "bodily" and "Psychological" are two different theories on instances of consciousness and you are just summarizing the two positions.
In which case saying "partial" for psychological is just a dodge: are you alive or not? — Mijin

Not theories of "instances of consciousness" but theories of personal continuity. What is relevant to personal continuity, bodily continuity, or psychological continuity?

"Partial" is not a dodge. I am saying that in the imperfect transporter case, the subject experiences zero bodily continuity and partial psychological continuity. Whether that constitutes (partial) survival depends on whether bodily or psychological is the relevant continuity.

Survival is not binary in the psychological sense. You can lose some of yourself, but not all of yourself, in a brain injury.

Given the two perspectives on continuity, Bodily and Psychological:

Aristotle
Bodily: dead
Psychological: dead

Stroke victim
Bodily: alive
Psychological: partial

Massive stroke victim
Bodily: alive
Psychological: dead

Perfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: alive

Imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: partial

Radically imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: dead

Aristotle is of the same status as a radically imperfect transport: dead. Both perspectives agree. But this doesn't preclude degrees of survival in the imperfect transporter, assuming that psychological continuity is what is relevant. This would not require the universe to set a hard line between what counts as survival or not. Psychological survival is continuous, not binary, and so there is no need for it to do so. Bodily survival is also continuous in the ship of Theseus sense, but binary in the familiar sense that bodies can endure only so much damage before they lose the ability to maintain homeostasis, which is what death is.

Now: the "imperfect transporter", that I have proposed, is an argument against Sent / Psychological continuity. — Mijin

I still don't think this works.

while "degree of difference" might be a continuous measure, whether you survive or not is binary (surviving in a imperfect state still counts as surviving). — Mijin

Is it really binary? If you have a major stroke, does all of you survive? If you have a stroke such that you completely assume the identity of Abraham Lincoln, does any of you survive?

We are accustomed to thinking of survival in bodily terms. And in bodily terms the answers would be "yes" in both cases. But this is just a habit, it might be the wrong metric here. If we thought of identity in psychological terms , the answers would be "no".

So I think this is only a problem if you assume bodily continuity from the outset.

It's like I have a theory of a new allotrope of carbon, but all the responses are questioning the existence of atoms. — Mijin

Perhaps your "new allotrope of carbon" isn't as interesting as you supposed.

No, I mean you conceded the words before that: that "I" refers to the individual subject of conscious experiences, in conflict with when you earlier claimed that both me and a duplicate would be two "I"s. — Mijin

I don't understand why you think these statements conflict.

A duplicate means two "I"s. Two people, each referring to themselves as "I", each individual subjects of conscious experience. Each with psychological continuity to the original. I haven't changed on this.

In terms of the "stick a pin" point, that is part of my answer to you when you asked "What exactly is the problem with multiple "I"s?" — Mijin

Ah, I see the confusion.

But this seems to be taking the position that I alluded to upthread as "Locke's conception"; that the critical thing is the pattern of memories, characteristics etc.
This also has issues; e.g. what if we don't delete the original, does it mean we have multiple "I"s? And how can that be, when the experiences of those I's is separate? — Mijin

If we don't delete the original, there will be multiple people with psychological continuity to the original. Each with distinct experiences. "I" only ever refers to the one that is speaking. What is wrong with this state of affairs? I still don't see the issue you were referring to originally.

The problem is firstly, you brought up the concept of multiple "I"s and now you're conceding that "I" refers to an individual because there is not a shared consciousness. — Mijin

I didn't realize I was conceding anything. When the hell did I say there was a shared consciousness?

The critical thing is if we have a model for understanding what happens to instances of consciousness. — Mijin

I gave a model. You said, but wait, there is a problem, what about two clones, and one sticks itself with a pin? I await a demonstration of any actual problem.

Because the pronoun "I" refers to this instance of consciousness. In the stick a pin example, I might say "I am in pain". What would two "I"s mean? — Mijin

"I" would mean the individual who was stuck. There are two numerically distinct individuals who claim continuity with the same individual in the past. I see nothing problematic.

n this case, a dead body is not identical to the body previously known to be the alive person (other than at the moment of death, but clearly this isn't relevant as the change occurs while alive to give us a different body at times t1, t2, t3 etc.. etc.. if we pick sufficient distal times (three-four month increments should do). — AmadeusD

I'm not following your logic here.

At the moment of death, you agree the body is identical to the body immediately before death.
Yet, personhood is extinguished at the moment of death.
This shows that personhood is not bodily identity.
Moreover, the moment of death is the relevant time. It is the time when personhood drops to zero, while bodily continuity is still intact. What happens months later is of no interest.

We would then discuss whether it actually takes seven years to disclaim identity, as hte skeleton takes longer to be replaced. Which change matters? At what point? To what degree? — AmadeusD

You might discuss this. I would find it as useless as any other discussion of Ship of Theseus criteria.

You believe personal identity can be 1:x. That's a big, big concession (not a negative one) in terms of reaching some conclusion. If you take this position, several outcomes of the transporter can be acceptable.

Most do not take this to be the situation. Most take personal identity to be, fundamentally, a 1:1 entity. I don't even think that obtains, but i digress. Whether or not personal identity requires identity is the open question. Once you have an intuition, the TE tests it. — AmadeusD

I believe this, and I have provided a notion of self which supports it, and which avoids the usual metaphysical quandaries of the TE. In real life, personal identity is indeed 1:1, it takes fantastic, futuristic scenarios for it not to be. Given that 1:1 is our actual, default experience, the fact that people also believe that personal identity is intrinsically 1:1, despite the quandaries in the TE this entails, carries vanishingly little weight.

They are not the same person. Obviously. I can't see how that's being missed?? If we're talking identity, you cannot have two people who are the same person. — AmadeusD

If we are talking numerical identity, then clearly not. But personal identity is obviously not numerical identity.

This is most clear in death. When someone dies, their body is the same body as (numerically identical with) the body that was alive. But there is no personal continuity between them. Numerical identity is not what we are talking about.

What is relevant is personal continuity, not numerical identity. And it is (logically) possible for two people to be both non-identical with each other and personally continuous with the same ancestor individual.

I thought I already said what the issue is: there might be two entities that could call themselves Mijin, but stick a pin in one, and the other doesn't feel pain. There are two instances of consciousness. — Mijin

And what is the problem with that?

And I don't know why you keep raising souls. As I say, within this topic it seems to only be invoked by people trying to express incredulence about the other position to their own.
I don't think anyone in this thread has taken the position that souls exist, certainly not me. — Mijin

Whether or not people explicitly believe in souls, my position is that there is an implicit presumption of souls in the abstract, that is, the mental model whereby we are non-physical entities that inhabit bodies. It is this mental model which gives rise to all the confusion of the teleporter thought experiment. Even the idea that continuity is an illusion, that we really live only in the instant, relies on this, as it fails to imagine continuity in the absence of something like a soul. If you abolish this intuition, I don't think there are any problems with teleportation. Continuity simply is the idea of self over time, over time. As long as this maintains, continuity maintains. Souls were always an illusion.

It does though. Going back to the OP, what if the transporter makes so many errors that (an alive) Abraham Lincoln walks out at the destination? He's alive, but nothing at all like the person that stepped on the source transporter pad. This illiustrates that the line for suriving or not is not the same as whether the original instance of consciousness is preserved or not, as the two are independent. — Mijin

So by "It does though", you are claiming that this illustrates that the universe does decree that "X=12,371 means surviving with brain damage, and X=12,372 means you effectively die from the injury"?

How is it decided what is confusion, and what is or is not a thing? — Patterner

Because for instance, nobody actually counts molecules or uses molecules as a criteria for identity (and as already established, nor does the universe). It is a made up criteria.

It's obviously unintuitive, but it is also unsatisfactory as it gives us no notion of self. It allows for 1:x without explanation. Isn't that an issue, to you? — AmadeusD

I have articulated a notion of self already. "Self" is a conceptual integration of sensory experience, mental experience, and memory into a unified idea. According to this notion, there is nothing contradictory about multiple individuals all having the idea of being you, and thus the experience of being you.

And this implies that, as unintuitive as it sounds, you "continue" after entering the teleporter, after being cloned, etc, because "continuance" is just the succession of these experiences of "self" over time.

Does this not seem unsatisfactory to you? — AmadeusD

It is unintuitive, but not "unsatisfactory". What is unsatisfactory is letting intuitions about persistent selves remain unchallenged.

If the universe isn't keeping track, meaning there is no objective answer, then it's up to each person to judge for themselves. — Patterner

Not necessarily. People can still be confused, and imagine criteria for "sameness" in certain scenarios that neither they nor anyone else actually apply. For instance, the criterion that "all the molecules have to be the same" is simply imaginary, its not actually a thing.

Yes. And?

if this factory is perfect in all detail, including the number of atoms of each type in every one of those thousand chairs, they are not all exactly the same chair. They are only all identical to each other. — Patterner

What we identify as "the exact same chair" is our mental bookkeeping we impose on the world. It is not a part of the world itself. The universe does not keep track of which chairs are the "exact same chairs". Only we do.

The same is true of people.

@Mijin@AmadeusD

I think the fundamental conceptual problem here is the nature of persistence.

The experience of personal persistence is, in the present,
1. To experience a self
2. To mentally project forward in time, to your hypothetical future self.
3. To mentally project backward in time, to your past selves.
4. In the second order, to consider the series of these forward and backward projections that have occurred over a lifetime.

That is all.

The problem comes when these operations are reified into an actual thing I am calling "the metaphysical self" that is actually moving forward in time. Only then does the problem of this thing being interrupted by physical discontinuity arise.

This also has issues; e.g. what if we don't delete the original, does it mean we have multiple "I"s? And how can that be, when the experiences of those I's is separate? — Mijin

What exactly is the problem with multiple "I"s? If we had metaphysical selves, aka souls, then it would be a problem. Which one would the soul ("I" here) go to? How could the soul be in two places at once? But if we don't, then simply, two entities would have the experience of being you, instead of one. What is the contradiction?

It's also vulnerable to the "imperfect transporter" as described in the OP. — Mijin

I see zero vulnerability here. There is only a problem, again, if you are secretly importing the notion of metaphysical selves. If not, it is just the problem of damage. If you sustain enough damage, you may not really be "you" any more, in the sense that you won't identify with your previous, undamaged self.

"why would the universe decree that, say, X=12,371 means surviving with brain damage, and X=12,372 means you effectively die from the injury?"

Obviously, the universe is doing no such thing. Adding a teleporter on top of this scenario changes nothing.

I say no for the same reasons you have outlined: MY mind stops having those experiences, even if a mind doesn't. The fact that someone thinks they are me doesn't mean they are. — AmadeusD

Despite what I said, I sympathize. To me the thought experiment is more real and poignant if it is less abstractly sci-fi.

Suppose you have a serious illness. In the near future, such illnesses are "treated" by creating perfect clones, minus only the defect. Mental state is set to exactly your current state. Once this is completed, the old body is painlessly killed. Would you accept the "treatment"?

Even though intellectually I would say 'yes', in truth I would certainly hesitate.

You believe that in daily life, any time I refer to "I" that I am making a metaphysical claim? — Mijin

No, normally not, normally "I" just designates the speaker. In this question, though, it seems to designate not the speaker as such, but an implicit ghost in the machine. Each and every aspect of the speaker that "I" normally designates (body, mind, personality, self-history, relationships) survive without question. So "I" here cannot be referring to any of those.

ISTM a reasonable question to ask whether I would survive the transporter as it would be to ask whether I would survive if all my brain activity ceased for n nanoseconds (as I'll address in my below post). — Mijin

This makes it even more clear. Everything 'I' normally designates obviously survives. The question therefore implicitly appeals to the universal intuition of a ghost in the machine, and asks if it survives. The question treats a concept as if it were an ontological entity that can be destroyed, and is hardly sensible.

To be more specific, I think this is focusing on third-person, objective facts. The situation is indeed simpler if we reduce our focus to that.
But the problem encompasses -- indeed is primarily concerned with -- the first-person, subjective facts. — Mijin

The facts I listed are as first person and subjective as I can think of a fact being. What"first person facts" am I leaving out? I think it is the kind of fact presupposed by the question "do I survive, or does someone else exit the teleporter?" What is the "I" in the question referring to if not the metaphysical self i am denying? And so there are no additional facts here, other than the fact of the non existence of the metaphysical self.

@AmadeusD

The actual problem is in figuring out which persistent self(s) exist. — Mijin

By posing this question you are importing the notion that there is a metaphysical, persistent self that may or may not persist.

By listing the facts that I did, I am claiming that these constitute the exhaustive facts of the matter. There are no additional facts about a metaphysical, persistent self that does or does not persist. The teleported person may or may not believe they persisted. The observers may or may not believe the teleported person persisted. But there are no underlying facts to support these beliefs, since there is no metaphysical, persistent self.

To repeat, these facts are:

* At every moment, we experience.
* These experiences cohere into a concept of a self.
* Via memory, these self-concepts cohere into the concept of a persistent, autobiographical self.

These are the relevant facts, full stop. You may apply them to the teleporter thought experiment, and make conclusions as you like. But you may not import fantastical notions of a metaphysical self. These aren't real, but instead are reifications of the autobiographical self concept we all have.

I realized I did a horrible job conveying just how tiny the coherent subset of every possible book is. One atom vs. the whole observable universe doesn't nearly do it justice.

Every possible book is represented by all 10^80 atoms in a special universe,
Where every single atom contains a sub-universe containing 10^80 atoms,
And each of those atoms contains a sub-universe containing 10^80 atoms,
And each of those atoms contains a sub-universe containing 10^80 atoms...
(repeat this 2167 more times)
Then one of those atoms represents the coherent subset.

Even though, to enumerate the coherent subset, one atom per book, you would need a nested universe like this, 482 layers deep!

And of course, that is just for paltry 100 pagers. It gets much, much worse as the page count goes up...

Using the English alphabet, what percent of the set of all possible books would be complete and comprehensible for any reader today? — Nils Loc

I think this is far more answerable than my question.

Assume the set of all 100 page books, 1500 characters per page. Ignore punctuation.

In the random case, that is 26^150000, or 10^212246, vastly, vastly larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe , just 10^80!

Now the coherent subset. Assume average word length of 5 words. Thats about 150000/5 = 25000 words. Given a incomplete text in a natural language, there are roughly, on average, 35 plausible word choices that may follow (according to chatgpt, who would know!). So roughly, that's about 35 ^ 25000, or 10^38602 "coherent" books (I suspect this is generous).

That still dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe, but is utterly dominated by the number of random texts. If the number of possible books was represented by all the atoms in the universe, the number of coherent books would be far, far, far, far less than one atom's worth!

Can you perhaps make it a bit more explicit how those facts obtain in that way? — AmadeusD

At every moment, you experience things: sensations from the world, and sensations from yourself. These are facts of experience.

These sensations don't just happen. Sensations from the world are oriented around the pole of the self. They are what the self experiences, from the self's perspective. Sensations from yourself (thoughts, body sensations, emotions) are about the self. Both experiences of the world and experiences of the self point to a self which is never actually disclosed. This gap is filled by the concept of the self, which papers over the hole with a self that experiences and a self that feels. This is the fact of the self-concept.

The self-concept perdures via memory. Through memory, it gains an autobiography, which is the concept of the autobiographical self.

Generally speaking, we do not walk into or out of teletransporters. — AmadeusD

I know it. But, I want to make clear, what the facts of the thought experiment are, and aren't. The facts are, when one steps out of the teleporter, one still experiences, still maintains a self concept, and may or may not maintain the concept of the autobiographical self. The comic posted by @wonderer1 illustrates this well. Seemingly everybody except the subject of the comic maintained the concept of the autobiographic self through the teleporter, and through sleep. But the absurdity is, there is no actual fact of the matter, there is no metaphysical self that perdures. The subject totally reconfigured their life because of a concept, not a fact.

The problem though is whether I am alive or not is not merely semantics. Right now I am having experiences of the world; those experiences can be at different levels; some are more vivid than others, but we can still say there is a binary between having experiences of any type, and simply no longer having experiences. — Mijin

These are the facts. Someone steps out of the teleporter. That someone has experiences. That someone has a self-autobiography, that tells it that it is, or is not, the same someone that stepped into the teleporter.

That is where the facts stop. These same facts obtain at every moment of everyone's waking life. There is nothing special about the teleporter. The "fact" that there "is" a person that persists moment to moment, day to day, year to year, into and out of teleporters, is more fiction than fact. It is a concept that unifies experiences, thoughts and feelings over time into a stable "self". But it has no metaphysical reality that underlies it.

This is the underlying fiction that gave rise to the notion of souls.

The core confusion of all such problems is the nature of identity. Identity is a mental label masquerading as a metaphysical property. When this is realized, just as with the ship of Theseus, you realize there is no strictly correct answer to such questions.

This leads to uncomfortable conclusion that survival in this kind of thought experiment is also a mental label, not an objective property. But I think this must be accepted. something survives. It may or may not think it survived. Observers may or may not think the original survived. That is really all that can be said.

This also leads to awkward conclusions in related thought experiment. Consider a cloner, that produces an identical copy of a person. The copy insists it is the original. According to my claim, the copy has just as much metaphysical claim that it is the true successor.

The fundamental problem is that identity is a concept that arose under conditions where such things couldn't happen. So the concept, not r backed by any metaphysical reality, cannot accommodate these kinds of thought experiment.

By "model the codex" I mean for the string and the codex to exist such that they are arranged in an identical combination of characters (whatever they might actually look like or represent for each). — ToothyMaw

So if in the codex we encounter,

:smile: :hearts: :smirk: :point: :lol: :wink: :nerd: :love: :roll: :monkey: :nerd:

Are you proposing we can map this to, say, "Dogs are Cute", and then proceed from there, with more mappings?

If not, please ground with a simple example.

The elite doesn't send its sons to Podunk State College, even if the kid is a certified idiot. — BC

PSC! Gooo Hayseeds!

Sorry, this made me chuckle.

Think Maw is just considering translation from an insufficient sample of text with known (incontrovertible) meaning. — Nils Loc

But the core premise is that there is no meaning at all in the text.

[

Trying to reconstruct a foreign dictionary with just a handful of entries sounds impossible and absurd, as would be finding meaning in the alien codex. — Nils Loc

Perhaps. But it would be interesting to see how the Coptic/Egyptian case, minus the Coptic, would have played out, had even today's technology been available. With far future technology, maybe decoding even a (meaningful) alien text would be tractable. It is, after all, ultimately a computational problem: there are only so many grammars that can produce the text, and only so many meanings that can be assigned to individual semantic units (though the alien factor would certainly compound the problem, there are certainly many alien meanings that would have no earthly correspondence and would be impossible to anticipate. There would have to be allowance for a fraction of words with unknowable meanings).

Indeed we had to have the Rosetta stone to finally crack the ancient hieroglyphs. Even before we could assume what they were telling: praising the greatness of the Pharaohs etc. What else do you write in Temples etc? In this case, people would be having argument on just what is the whole function of the "book". — ssu

Yes, this is the other side of the coin that I don't think has been mentioned yet. It may be that even if the contents were perfectly meaningful, we would never be able to crack it.

I think if this book arrived today, this would be the case. We would need a Rosetta Stone, or something , to assist, beyond the text itself. This is why I appealed not just to the focused effort of all the worlds linguists, but to transhuman AI, and fully matured quantum computers that could evaluate millions of grammars in a second. Would this be enough? Not sure!

I hate to frustrate you, but I'm just not following you here. Maybe eli5?

So, to make it as clear as possible, that means that only an incontrovertible meaning has a 100% chance of being the correct meaning, and every other interpretation has a chance of being correct that aligns with a probability assigned according to how close it is to being incontrovertible. — ToothyMaw

"Incontrovertible" seems far from a rigorous, objective term. It is a "know it when I see it" kind of thing. At one end are completely coherent novels, or the musings of an alien Aristotle. At the other end is gibberish. But between them is a whole hazy spectrum of material that kind of makes sense, if you squint hard enough, make ample allowances for alien references and ways of thinking, and don't pay too much attention to all the contradictions. I suspect that something along these lines would be the best case scenario. Here, one person's "incontrovertible" is another's "horseshit".

But that is only half the problem. The other half is the method the transition was achieved. You can imagine a perfectly ad hoc method, like, "XYZ means ABC, when seen on page one". This might yield an "incontrovertible" text: "One million moons ago our 12-eyed ancestors first descended from the trees...", but that is meaningless because the method was bullshit. On the other end, you can have a beautiful, logical grammar. Again, in between these two lies a spectrum of complications, exceptions, and hacks.

Both translation and method have to be evaluated, not one or the other.

Is there any way we can ground our speculation as to whether there are many possible perfect impositions of meaning of or just a few or only one that works for the codex? — Nils Loc

Or none. But that is the question. Is there a linguist in the house?

Couldn't it be possible that there are actually hundreds to billions of variations of meaning that can be imposed on the codex that satisfy the level of coherence hypericin/humanity is looking for. If this was known to be the likelihood, the meaning of any can be disputed within/against that set of all possibilities. — Nils Loc

Good point. If one coherent (whatever that means) interpretation can be produced it seems likely innumerable can be. This will call the legitimacy of all of them into question. There might be advocates of each of them.

This is one logical outcome. However I still intuitively feel that no coherent (whatever that means) translation can ever be produced.

I don't understand this assumption. Does every novel have a single incontrovertible meaning? — Nils Loc

Really I should have said "translation", not "meaning". And it is true, not every earth-language translation is the same. What I really meant was, the assumption has to be that the thing isn't War and Peace (in spaaace) and a dietetic guidebook.