Universal language - a thought experiment

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
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eyekwah
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Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by eyekwah »

The purpose of this thread is not to prove or disprove anything. It is a thought experiment to see if we, as a collective brain, can develop concepts or ideas superior than our own. For this reason, it's important to establish a couple rules which I kindly ask you to follow if you wish to contribute:

1) Posts can only be constructive, which is to say, it is always in the best interests of the collective idea to post whether it be adding to an existing idea or criticizing an already existing idea. However remember there's a thin line between constructive criticism and tearing to pieces someone's idea because you disagree that it's possible.

2) You must be open-minded or very little will be accomplished. Insisting that the collective idea is worse than your own idea is either going to accomplish nothing or derail the collective idea to someone's misguided attempts to convince people they know best.

3) See #2.

The collective idea that I would like this thread to achieve is the concept of a universal language. I think it'd be best to start by making some definitions. A universal language is a sort of Rosetta Stone which an alien race could read given certain prerequisites:
Assume an alien knows no earth-born language but speaks a language which can replicate all the syllables used in earth language
Assume this alien can distinguish colors as well as black and white.
Assume this alien begins "reading" this document from the top.

What would the Rosetta Stone look like that an alien could (eventually) interpret and understand this universal language?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Again, the point of this thread is to construct an idea from pieces of brilliant ideas from contributors. Every now again I'll write a riepilog with all agreed-upon points and points of disagreement.

So to start things, perhaps we should start with an easier question:
How could you establish to an alien species simple mathematical properties (1 = 1, 0 != 1, a - a = 0, etc.)?
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cousinbasil
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Re: Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by cousinbasil »

The Golden Record aboard Voyager was a stab in this direction.
eyekwah
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Re: Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by eyekwah »

It was more like a time capsule than a serious attempt at trying to communicate with alien species. It's tempting to say that if an alien species were intelligent enough to communicate, they could figure out what we mean, though I believe it's safe to assume that if human beings couldn't learn chinese soley by hearing a couple phrases in chinese, neither could aliens.

Thus the objective remains to be able to communicate with an alien species from the ground up. What is the minimum amount of axioms one would have to assume in order to assure that aliens could understand a message that you could write on a piece of paper? Again, if assumptions have to be made, lets make them.
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cousinbasil
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Re: Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by cousinbasil »

An earlier attempt was the Pioneer Plaque - You are dismissing these, but these were actual Rosetta Stone-like attempts at the very thing you proposed in your opening post.
eyekwah
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Re: Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by eyekwah »

Do they merit mention? Thank you for bringing it to our attention. It should be used as reference to what I hope to accomplish in this thread. However if you're implying that we shouldn't attempt anything because it's been thought up before is about as logical as refusing to go to outer space because it's been done before.

Rather, if the point is to see what we, as a collective group, can come up with, so far this is fairly disappointing. I expect more constructive posts in the future.
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cousinbasil
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Re: Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by cousinbasil »

Well, yes they do merit mention, simply because when one sets out to accomplish something, it doesn't hurt to find out how others have approached the same task.

That being said, you have not really identified what you seek to accomplish. Does your scenario include feedback? By that I mean, are we face-to-face with this alien intelligence, or are we creating an artifact or device that we are sending out into space like the Pioneer Plaque?

Either way, it seems like establishing a rudimentary digital language is the most basic way to go. I think any kind of communication would require agreeing on something that means yes as opposed to another thing which means no. Ones and zeroes do it - as long as the symbols are distinct, they can stand for anything like up/down, left/right, on/off. More fundamentally, they must be discernible, then they must be distinct. Do we know what light spectrum is perceived by the alien intelligence, or what atmospheric vibration frequency (sound pitch)? How does the life form perceive?

One approach might be to reduce the information to digital encoding, then repeat that digital information identically in different media simultaneously. You could have the identical strings reproducing at various bandwidths of the EM spectrum, while being repeated mechanically via rhythm and physically as an object with raised and lowered surfaces in sequence. All an alien intelligence would require is to be able to perceive one of the modes of transmission - if it could comprehend more than one, it would reinforce its reception of the transmission.

Questions like that depend on whether we have a feedback mechanism, so if one approach fails, another can be tried.

You are asking if it is possible to bootstrap a protocol. There is probably some technical debate about this within information theory. But the first thing has to be the awareness that for any kind of signal to be perceivable, it must stand out as having a lower entropy state than its environment. Random signals have higher entropy than those containing information.
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mental vagrant
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Re: Universal language - a thought experiment

Post by mental vagrant »

cousinbasil wrote:Well, yes they do merit mention, simply because when one sets out to accomplish something, it doesn't hurt to find out how others have approached the same task.

That being said, you have not really identified what you seek to accomplish. Does your scenario include feedback? By that I mean, are we face-to-face with this alien intelligence, or are we creating an artifact or device that we are sending out into space like the Pioneer Plaque?

Either way, it seems like establishing a rudimentary digital language is the most basic way to go. I think any kind of communication would require agreeing on something that means yes as opposed to another thing which means no. Ones and zeroes do it - as long as the symbols are distinct, they can stand for anything like up/down, left/right, on/off. More fundamentally, they must be discernible, then they must be distinct. Do we know what light spectrum is perceived by the alien intelligence, or what atmospheric vibration frequency (sound pitch)? How does the life form perceive?

One approach might be to reduce the information to digital encoding, then repeat that digital information identically in different media simultaneously. You could have the identical strings reproducing at various bandwidths of the EM spectrum, while being repeated mechanically via rhythm and physically as an object with raised and lowered surfaces in sequence. All an alien intelligence would require is to be able to perceive one of the modes of transmission - if it could comprehend more than one, it would reinforce its reception of the transmission.

Questions like that depend on whether we have a feedback mechanism, so if one approach fails, another can be tried.

You are asking if it is possible to bootstrap a protocol. There is probably some technical debate about this within information theory. But the first thing has to be the awareness that for any kind of signal to be perceivable, it must stand out as having a lower entropy state than its environment. Random signals have higher entropy than those containing information.
http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32782

You make good points. A RS would need to trial all sorts of pattern matching before the life might come close to a common sense if at all possible. I'd imagine, that imaginings have potential to be so different that a RS might not have any meaningfull effect. This said, the topic merits some thought.
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