From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Fri Aug 13 2004 - 11:12:12 MDT
James MacAulay wrote:
> It's a very good point that both math and spoken language are codes.
Math is
> a code that is very good at precisely modelling a great many conceptual
> systems. English or Chinese or Swahili, on the other hand, are very
good at
> *communicating* the actual experience of our world to other human
beings, in
> certain ways that we've found useful in the course of our evolution.
If you
> say, "being on stage made me feel like I had butterflies in my stomach,"
> even someone who has never heard that expression used will nonetheless
get a
> vivid impression of the experience you are describing.
Rephrasing the point doesn't change its content. The only reason
communication seems "compressed" is because most humans are carrying
around some approximation of the same learned coding table in their
brains for expanding those words into additional information. If you
add the coding table (itself a finite pattern) with the finite word
pattern, you'll *still* end up with a finite mathematical pattern.
Layers of abstraction exist for the sake of efficiency and do not change
the basic nature of the patterns contained in the abstractions.
I'm pretty sure the math of all this has been argued before on SL4.
This entire discussion is reflogging the long-dead horse of arbitrary
and infinite compression, not a productive pursuit. A rigorous
construction of the question would have made it obvious, but instead we
are getting caught up in semantics.
j. andrew rogers
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