About Books and Rosetta Stones...
Jan 17, 2015 2:10:40 GMT
Post by Goldenfleeced on Jan 17, 2015 2:10:40 GMT
I ran into this information today, which I couldn't help thinking was fairly 'serendipitous,' considering that the subject of 'Rosetta Stones' was raised elsewhere, and my thoughts were turned in that direction, so to speak, and also the recent quote that I gave you by Louis Claude de St Martin (the Unknown Philosopher), in which he stated that the only book ever written by the hand of 'God' was Man. I have felt the truth of that statement, and have found what I believe to be fair 'modern' corroboration for this bit of arcane philosophy to which you probably have not given much credence.... truthfully.
This quote is taken from a book that I picked up a few years ago, now, titled "Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid," written by Nobel Prize winner Douglas R. Hofstatdter... I believe that I've mentioned this work before, on other forums. It is most excellent, and he explains the way in which humans and the computer program... well... with Lewis Carroll, and... it's quite fabulous, really, you should get a copy. Anyway, here is the quote, and I hope that you can see the relevance to the above:
Schrodinger's Aperiodic Crystals
What makes us see a frame message in certain objects, but not in others? Why should an alien civilization suspect, if they intercept an errant record, that a message lurks within? What would make a record any different from a meteorite? Clearly its geometric shape is the first clue that "something funny is going on." The next clue is that, on a more microscopic scale, it consists of a very long aperiodic sequence of patterns, arranged in a a spiral. If we were to unwrap the spiral, we would have one huge linear sequence (around 2000 feet long) of miniscule symbols. This is not so different from a DNA molecule, whose symbols, drawn from a meager "alphabet" of four different chemical bases, are arrayed in a one-dimensional sequence, and then coiled up into a helix. Before Avery had established the connection between genes and DNA, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger predicted, on purely theoretical grounds, that genetic information would have to be stored in "aperiodic crystals" in his influential book, "What is Life?" In fact, books themselves are aperiodic crystals contained inside neat geometrical forms. These examples suggest that, where an aperiodic crystal is found "packaged" inside a very regular geometric structure, there may lurk an inner message...
So... we can say with Truth then, that Man very well may be (comparing our DNA strands with books here) the only 'book' written by the hand of 'God'...
Provocative, don't you think...?
And speaking of Escher, let's add a strand to our 'golden braid'...
I can make a 'story' out of these three images... what do you see? In other words, how do you 'translate' these images? Can you read 'between the lines?' After all, every picture tells a story... isn't that right?
Now, I'd like to add these thoughts regarding 'deciphering,' or 'translating,' these 'coded' messages from the same book, in a bit titled, "The Heroic Decipherers"...
Another illuminating example of these ideas is the decipherment of ancient texts written in unknown languages and unknown alphabets. The intuition feels that there is information inherent in such texts, whether or not we succeed in revealing it. It is as strong a feeling as the belief that there is meaning inherent in a newspaper written in Chinese, even if we are completely ignorant of Chinese. Once the script or language of a text has been broken, then no one questions where the meaning resides: clearly it resides in the text, not in the method of decipherment -- just as music resides in a record, not inside a record player. One of the ways that we identify decoding mechanisms is by the fact that they do not add any meaning to the signs or objects which they take as input; they merely reveal the intrinsic meaning of those signs or objects. A jukebox is not a decoding mechanism, for it does not reveal any meaning belonging to its input symbols; on the contrary, it supplies meaning concealed inside itself.
Now the decipherment of an ancient text may have involved decades of labor by several rival teams of scholars, drawing on knowledge stored in libraries all over the world... doesn't this process add information, too? Just how intrinsic is the meaning of a text, when such mammoth efforts are required in order to find the decoding rules? Has one put meaning into the text, or was that meaning already there? My intuition says that the meaning was always there, and that despite the arduousness of the pulling-out process, no meaning was pulled out that wasn't in the text to start with...
In other words, the possible translations were inherent in the message... in fact, they are the message... and the 'decoding' does not 'add' meaning to the message, but only 'reveals' it for what it is... like a 'Rosetta Stone,' let's say...
If you see what I mean...
And now that you've had a minute to digest that, substitute the 'Book' of Man, written in a 'script' that you don't understand, for the 'text' referred to in the quote above...
Know thyself...
This quote is taken from a book that I picked up a few years ago, now, titled "Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid," written by Nobel Prize winner Douglas R. Hofstatdter... I believe that I've mentioned this work before, on other forums. It is most excellent, and he explains the way in which humans and the computer program... well... with Lewis Carroll, and... it's quite fabulous, really, you should get a copy. Anyway, here is the quote, and I hope that you can see the relevance to the above:
Schrodinger's Aperiodic Crystals
What makes us see a frame message in certain objects, but not in others? Why should an alien civilization suspect, if they intercept an errant record, that a message lurks within? What would make a record any different from a meteorite? Clearly its geometric shape is the first clue that "something funny is going on." The next clue is that, on a more microscopic scale, it consists of a very long aperiodic sequence of patterns, arranged in a a spiral. If we were to unwrap the spiral, we would have one huge linear sequence (around 2000 feet long) of miniscule symbols. This is not so different from a DNA molecule, whose symbols, drawn from a meager "alphabet" of four different chemical bases, are arrayed in a one-dimensional sequence, and then coiled up into a helix. Before Avery had established the connection between genes and DNA, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger predicted, on purely theoretical grounds, that genetic information would have to be stored in "aperiodic crystals" in his influential book, "What is Life?" In fact, books themselves are aperiodic crystals contained inside neat geometrical forms. These examples suggest that, where an aperiodic crystal is found "packaged" inside a very regular geometric structure, there may lurk an inner message...
So... we can say with Truth then, that Man very well may be (comparing our DNA strands with books here) the only 'book' written by the hand of 'God'...
Provocative, don't you think...?
And speaking of Escher, let's add a strand to our 'golden braid'...
I can make a 'story' out of these three images... what do you see? In other words, how do you 'translate' these images? Can you read 'between the lines?' After all, every picture tells a story... isn't that right?
Now, I'd like to add these thoughts regarding 'deciphering,' or 'translating,' these 'coded' messages from the same book, in a bit titled, "The Heroic Decipherers"...
Another illuminating example of these ideas is the decipherment of ancient texts written in unknown languages and unknown alphabets. The intuition feels that there is information inherent in such texts, whether or not we succeed in revealing it. It is as strong a feeling as the belief that there is meaning inherent in a newspaper written in Chinese, even if we are completely ignorant of Chinese. Once the script or language of a text has been broken, then no one questions where the meaning resides: clearly it resides in the text, not in the method of decipherment -- just as music resides in a record, not inside a record player. One of the ways that we identify decoding mechanisms is by the fact that they do not add any meaning to the signs or objects which they take as input; they merely reveal the intrinsic meaning of those signs or objects. A jukebox is not a decoding mechanism, for it does not reveal any meaning belonging to its input symbols; on the contrary, it supplies meaning concealed inside itself.
Now the decipherment of an ancient text may have involved decades of labor by several rival teams of scholars, drawing on knowledge stored in libraries all over the world... doesn't this process add information, too? Just how intrinsic is the meaning of a text, when such mammoth efforts are required in order to find the decoding rules? Has one put meaning into the text, or was that meaning already there? My intuition says that the meaning was always there, and that despite the arduousness of the pulling-out process, no meaning was pulled out that wasn't in the text to start with...
In other words, the possible translations were inherent in the message... in fact, they are the message... and the 'decoding' does not 'add' meaning to the message, but only 'reveals' it for what it is... like a 'Rosetta Stone,' let's say...
If you see what I mean...
And now that you've had a minute to digest that, substitute the 'Book' of Man, written in a 'script' that you don't understand, for the 'text' referred to in the quote above...
Know thyself...
