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.

Humanity must assume that the codex has a single, incontrovertible meaning. What throws me off is when you say that we can start with a single string that can have that meaning. Absent a full translation, and absent a hint such as pictograms or numbers, the only way to verify that a single string is decoded correctly is if that string is part of a larger body of text that is decoded correctly. For instance, of the first ten pages read like alien War and Peace, or highly coherent scientific or philosophical discourse, it is somewhat probable that each of the strings is decoded correctly. If the grammar used to decode the first ten pages is applied successfully to more pages, the likelihood grows. But a single string? I don't see how you can get anywhere with that.

That is to say that if we could, across the distribution of meanings the codex could take on, narrow down the likelihoods of certain interpretations over others, there is probably one that is most likely, although I don't know to what degree, or what degree to which it would have to be the case to be considered the correct interpretation. — ToothyMaw

I think this is right, and I think cohernece is the only criteria we can use to decide likelihood (the fact that these are aliens means we have to make huge allowances for things that don't make sense, which makes this evaluation much more difficult).

But seemingly endless amounts of complexity can also be off-loaded to the perceiver. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is cheating, and would be readily apparent to the community of decoders. You are essentially putting the decoding into the decoder.

Suppose someone came up with an ad-hoc decoder, like

" :rage: :naughty: :heart:" = "Call me Ishmael", when it appears on page 1.

Someone else could come up with decoder, much smaller than the ad-hoc decoder, that decodes the ad-hoc decoder itself into the ad-hoc decoding.

if there is a kernel of meaning insofar as a certain combination of the characters could have an incontrovertible meaning — ToothyMaw

But what possible combination of characters could have an incontrovertible meaning, given that there is in fact no meaning at all to the codex?

This allows us to guess at the meaning of fragments of the codex by logging the valid one-dimensional strings of meaning and then guessing at their potential meaning as written pieces of communication by substituting alien characters with (perhaps arbitrarily assigned) meanings until the agreement with those one-dimensional strings terminates and then repeat the process. — ToothyMaw

I don't follow what you are proposing. What is a "valid one dimensional strong of meaning"?

If it is an encrypted alien message, the task is certainly hopeless. But if it was, then it wouldn't display the language like regularities I mentioned.

In any case the op is different from decryption. Decryption is about decoding meaning from a signal. The op is about mapping meaning onto nonsense.

Isn't imposing a false meaning on the text achievable with a considerable bit of work? It's just mapping a known language/meaning onto a novel set of symbols. The text could probably serve as code for innumerable different meanings. I guess it really depends on the patterns/regularities of the text in question. — Nils Loc

Sorry, let me try again, I might have gotten mixed up in my last attempt to reply to this.

I guess what I am asking is precisely this. CAN a false meaning be imposed on such a text? It seems genuinely unclear to me.

Consider one symbol, A. Literally any meaning can be imposed. Now two symbols, AB. Still, any meaning pair will do. Now repeat those in some pattern:

ABBAAB

Now, meaning already becomes quite constrained. There are only so many values we can assign to A and B such that the string makes sense (for instance, it might be instructions to enter a code to a lock where there are two options ). Now consider the codex. 512 pages of words appearing with some probability distribution, and phrases in some probability distribution. But with no underlying semantic content. By page 5 the constraints are already bad, by 512 they are crushing. Can ANY meaning at all be imposed on this thing? It it just not clear to me.

Isn't imposing a false meaning on the text achievable with a considerable bit of work? It's just mapping a known language/meaning onto a novel set of symbols. — Nils Loc

No. Imagine how the symbols are arranged in a language, vs noise. There is a lot of structure and repetition in a language, whereas noise has none.

Apparently you can encode information in noise. Binary code looks like digital noise. — Nils Loc

Noise by definition carries no information. Binary code does not look like noise unless it has been perfectly compressed.

But in this case, I'm going to go out on a limb and call nonsense. — unenlightened

We can with the benefit of omniscience. I wonder if the earthlings ever can.

It seems to me there must be a kernel of meaning, or perhaps some arbitrary carry-over from the aliens’ actual means of written expression, to the codex, for there to be some sort of incontrovertible message to be derived in the codex. — ToothyMaw

I think we are in the same page. It is not possible to derive a message from noise. But that is just my intuition.

I think most people would never get too far convincing others about the “meaning” of its “language.” — Fire Ologist

Everything about the presentation screams "language". And note that the aliens embedded language like statistical patterns into the noise.

Some here may find the history of investigation of the Voynich Manuscript interesting. — wonderer1

I had indeed heard of it, this is probably the closest real life analog to my post. Epistemically that is, we still don't know what it is (which surprises me).

I'm guessing if the text contains what could be construed as universal patterns, then maybe that could be used as a basis for discovering more complex meanings. — Nils Loc

You missed some key parts of the op.

Are we talking about any interpretation at all? Or specifically one that would comport with what we might expect intelligent aliens (who have decided to communicate with us) to have to say to us? — ToothyMaw

Any interpretation at all is too permissive, only our alien expectations is too restrictive. What I am asking is, can a incontrovertible message be derived (and in doing so, likely a language)?

No interpretation. It's not a language. — L'éléphant

Maybe. But that is just semantics. "Is it an interpretation or isn't it" is ultimately definitional. I'm interested if meaning can be constructed in noise.



Did you miss

In truth, what some suspected, only half in jest, turned out to be correct. The text was a practical joke played on humanity by a cruel and whimsical alien species. It is complete nonsense, random gibberish, imbued with enough regularity to look like a plausible language, but no more. — hypericin

@Mijin If spatial-temporal continuity is required to maintain identity, then your case adds nothing, the subject is killed no matter what.
If it is not required, then your case reduces to, "How much damage can someone sustain before becoming a new person?"

Are informational objects causally related in the same sense that physical objects are? If so, how. I not how so? — I like sushi

Yes, you can look to life as the best example. Genetic code influences other generic code, messenger molecules, large and small scale structure, really the entire informational and physical reality of all life.

a complete account needs to include both halves of the relation, so to speak. If information is like numerals, then we need to know the status of numbers -- "informational content", perhaps? Or, if information is like numbers, what do we understand numerals to be? I'm calling them "instantiations", but maybe "informational vehicles" is better. Or just "symbols"? — J

I would say there are three terms, not two. Substrate, encoding, and content. Substrate is purely physical, content is purely informational, and they meet in the encoding. "3" encodes the information, 3. Outside the "3" there is a fourth thing, decoder, which interprets "3" by instantiating 3 as a native encoding (synaptic firing pattern in humans, or the electrical pattern 00000011 in a computer)

Note that it might seem that the interpretation is fully a subjective act by the decoder, and that the information (and encoding) are in no way "in" the object. But this is wrong. While this might seem to be the case for "3", imagine taking a pile of sand and decoding Disney's Beauty and the Beast from it. Totally not possible, the information is just not "in" the sand, the way it is"in" the VHS tape.

I have a leaf. In list A itemize those parts of the leaf that are information. In list B itemize those parts that are substrate. — Hanover

A:
The leaf is red.
The leaf has such and such shape.
The genetic sequence is ATATGCA...

B:
(The actual light reflected)
(The actual molecules arranged in such a shape)
(The DNA)

A way to think about the distinction is that state can be exhaustively captured in words. If you write out a map of the color at every point, the exact shape, the full genetic sequence, that is the state, divorced from the leaf's substrate. Whereas no amount of marks on paper can equal a physical leaf.

Can you imagine an non-physical object? Can you refer to something that has velocity but no material qualities? I think you will find in both cases that the answer is no. — I like sushi

Yes, I imagine informational objects, so do many. Using technology these days does that to you. Velocity is typically a property of material objects, but it has an informational analog in data transmission rates.

This is true of items liek 'and' in language. The 'and' does not exist materially, yet it serves a function for describing material items. — I like sushi

"And" doesn't describe a material item. It is a kind of semantic glue that doesn't describe anything in itself, it is used with other words to create meaning, which may or may not refer to material items.

Words by the way are paradigmatic examples of informational objects. Is the 'and' on a paper the same as these 'and's on your screen?

You can't have it both ways. You can't say that all art is equally art, and then say that some art is "barely" art, or that some art "only marginally identifies as art," or that some art is, "hardly art at all." Inclusion within the category 'art' is either absolute or its not. If "art-likeness [...] determines whether something is art or not," and whether something is art or not does not come in degrees, then "art-likeness" cannot come in degrees. — Leontiskos

I don't want it both ways. When have I said that "whether something is art or not does not come in degrees"?

No, the problem is the word "barely," which implies that some things qualify as art less than others. You began using that word when you talked about, "barely belonging to the category at all." — Leontiskos

Yes. To qualify as art less, means it only marginally identifies as art. Oatmeal, or a poo painting. This is not a value judgement, this is a statement about what the object is; that is, hardly art at all. You keep insisting that this is a value judgement.

Is data stored in a computer "information," or are you referencing the meaning a conscious being imposes on it? — Hanover

Data on a computer certainly is. I think information and interpretation have to be kept distinct. Note that it doesn't need to be a conscious being doing the interpretation.

For example, does the red leaf contain non-physical information that autumn has arrived, or is the red itself physical information? — Hanover

That autumn has arrived is an interpretation, it is not latent in the leaf itself. That same red leaf might be red due to a mutation, a response to a parasite, etc.

The red itself is information, though we don't usually think of it that way. Ontologically information is state divorced from substrate. But we think of information as state encoded on a substrate optimized for state retrieval and manipulation. So the leaf contains endless state, including its color and all the subtle variations in its shading, but it cannot be retrieved or manipulated easily. While the information in the leaf's genetic code is very much information in this sense.

You've switched from a comparison to an absolute. What I said did not imply that an artist must care for every piece of art. — Leontiskos

Comparison to absolute? What does that mean?

It is not the artist caring, it is the critic. A critic can acknowledge that a piece is "artistic", yet not like it.

Your idea that what counts as art and what counts as good art are two entirely separate issues looks to be mistaken, and one way to see this is by looking at our "notable point of agreement": — Leontiskos

How? I don't see it.

Out "notable agreement" speaks only to identity, not quality. It seems you can't stop conflating the two, if you think otherwise. Is the word "qualifies" throwing you off?

Yeah this is definitely an aspect that still bothers me. And it will endlessly make the "guru says nothing" solution distasteful unless it's figured out. — flannel jesus

It is not a solution whatsoever until @Michael can prove it.

In the "official" formulation I saw on Popular Mechanics, it says something to the effect that the islanders do not do anything unless they are logically certain of the outcome. I think this is key. It is impossible to be logically certain that in everyone's mental modelling of everyone's mental modelling, everyone can see blue. In reality, no matter how logical the islanders are, they would see 99 other blues and just say fuck it and act as Michael suggests.