[ExI] Subjective/Objective

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 14/07/2026 23:59, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 3:33 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote (in response to Brent):
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> >     And again, you're saying that there is a type of message that is not abstract. This is an extraordinary claim, as I've already said. Please give us some extraordinary evidence for this physics-breaking new kind of message. If you can't, then you shouldn't be saying that such a thing exists. If I said that we see colours because tiny unicorns charge around in our brains with coloured horns, and jab them into the parts of our visual cortex that make us see colours, I would only expect to be challenged for proof, and if I couldn't provide any, I could only expect to be told to shut up and come back when I had some. That's fair, isn't it?
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> >     I tell you what, let's drop the requirement for extraordinary evidence. Just /some/ evidence. Just give us one example. One single example of a message that carries within it its own meaning. A message that can be understood without context, without having to use some method of decoding it. I've been racking my brains trying to disprove this hypothesis that all messages are abstract (that's what scientists do, and while I'm not actually a scientist, I'm a big fan of the scientific method), and have so far drawn a blank, so that's still my default position. Even ".  ..  ..." is not an unambiguous message, needing no context to decode. So that's a second hypothesis you are invited to disprove.
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> There are two tracks that lead in opposite directions.
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> In the first track, it can be proved that any message can be interpreted in any way, and this is a result from cryptography, in particular the OTP encryption method allows any message to be encrypted to any other message with equal probability. In this sense, every message can be viewed as entirely abstracted from its meaning and interpretation.
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> In the second track, which I think you were alluding to with ". .. ..." I think you are showing that some messages inherently convey meaning, even without any pre-existing shared context. Think about the Arecebo message broadcast to aliens, or deciphering an ancient language, or how LLMs learn about the world given only a large corpus of text.
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> This I think can be proved about messages that are compressible. For any string that is compressible has inherent discoverable patterns within it. Discovering the patterns in the text can allow someone, even who has no prior context, to understand the meaning of the message. Consider that in the massive text corpus are all kinds of measured data about the world, say the positions of the planets at various days across many years. Given enough analysis, a compression algorithm could figure out that these positions correspond to elliptical orbits that follow Kepler's law and as viewed from one of the orbiting bodies. So from merely a list of numbers, a sufficient analysis can reveal all kinds of things about the universe in which this list of numbers was generated.


I wasn't trying to say that some messages inherently convey meaning, just the opposite. The ". .. ..." message is one that's familiar to us, precisely because of our SETI efforts and our attempts to create unambiguous messages that aliens might be able to understand. We are familiar with a context, so can make a guess at the meaning (which would be wrong, in this case).

Someone with a mathematical background would probably assume that the message says something about prime numbers, or maybe Pascal's triangle, or some other mathematical structure. And they'd be wrong.

What I had in mind (the actual meaning of the message) wasn't any of those. My point is that nobody can know what I intended those dots to mean, and no system can derive the meaning, without knowing my intention or having some decoding system that assumes that intention.

I'm sure you're right about compressible strings and discoverable patterns.

Where my idea possibly breaks down is, as you say, when there are large amounts of information. The example of LLMs is probably the best one.

When there is a very large amount of information, probably spread across many messages, it's probably possible to find patterns that correspond to patterns from another source, like the real world, and guess that there's some real link, and keep going on that basis until the messages can be deciphered to make sense with respect to the other source. It's very unlikely that, with enough information, this process will give false results.

That's not the same thing, though, as a message that contains its own meaning, without any context. That's many messages, correlated with a guessed context (like the elliptical orbits example), and probably many attempts to fit the data to the context.

So while what you say is correct, I don't think it invalidates my claim, which after all is actually quite modest. If those dots are fed into a nerve axon, in isolation, there's no way that whatever the axon leads to will be able to interpret my intended meaning. It will use its own pre-set mechanisms and context to interpret the message, and it will come up with the wrong answer. The meaning of the message is what is heard, not what is said (to quote one of the Assumptions of NLP).

What interests me is Brent's claim that there exists some other kind of messaging (what he's calling 'Non-causal messages', I think), and what that could possibly be (especially as it would, as far as I know, break the laws of physics). I suspect it's a figment of his imagination, but it's up to him to demonstrate that it actually exists.

-- 
Ben