How is your description of English as a compression format different from the idea of the detached lever, where one puts the characters a p p l e into a computer and hopes it will have crunchy, juicy properties?
I believe I speak Modern English, and could probably look for wavy hands on sticks penicillin mold or coil wires around magnets, but how does “atoms can be split” help me reproduce a major scientific/engineering discovery? It’s not a compressed instruction, it’s a teachers password I can say to other people who know that atoms can be split so we can be comfortably “scientific” in each other’s presence. I don’t know what it means in terms of equations, machinery, or testable predictions—and more to the point, - I still don’t know what it means after reading the t-shirt.
I could probably grope about in a corpse and find a heart or a lung, but how do I tell when I have a pancreas instead of a phlogistondix? And which bit of it is the pancreatic duct? And how do I tell if the fluid that comes out of the unknown lump of creature that I have is insulin? Or after injection, how to tell if it’s working?
The only constrained anticipation I have for ‘insulin’ is that it helps diabetic people—although I now note that I have no real idea what ‘diabetic people’ means in medical terms or how, if I were thrust back in time, I would be able to reliably identify them.
I suggest that t-shirt is not a compressed guide, it’s a memory aid for people who already know the details behind it and who could, if their memory was entirely under their command, manage exactly the same without it.
English is a compression algorithm, but most of the information required for that algorithm is stored in your brain. Your brain hears the word “apple” and expands it to represent everything that you know about apples. If your brain can’t expand “pancreas” as far, that is a characteristic of your brain and not the word.
As is true of software compression algorithms, the purpose of your brain’s compression algorithm is to allow you to shrink the size of your knowledge and messages, at the cost of computing time and accuracy.
The only constrained anticipation I have for ‘insulin’ is that it helps diabetic people—although I now note that I have no real idea what ‘diabetic people’ means in medical terms or how, if I were thrust back in time, I would be able to reliably identify them.
I suggest that t-shirt is not a compressed guide, it’s a memory aid for people who already know the details behind it and who could, if their memory was entirely under their command, manage exactly the same without it.
But these terms don’t exist in complete isolation. Say for example I’m sent back to 1850. Then I don’t know what the different parts of a pancreas look like, but doctors will know. So I can bootstrap my knowledge based on that (and presumably they know what a diabetic is and how to recognize them). Some of these (like using quartz crystals to make clocks) are difficult due to infrastructural problems, but most of them have large amounts of associated ideas that connect to the terms.
By analogy with the issue being discussed, the terms being used don’t function completely as detached levers, since when we have a written record of you saying “I like to eat apples but not oranges” we have a specific idea of what “apple” means.
Are you saying that once you have a written record of me mentioning apples, then you can talk to me about ‘apples’ with no explanation, but before that you would have to talk to me about ‘apples (which are …)’ with an explanation?
Are you saying that once you have a written record of me mentioning apples, then you can talk to me about ‘apples’ with no explanation, but before that you would have to talk to me about ‘apples (which are …)’ with an explanation?
Hmm, ok. That can’t be right when phrased that way. So something is wrong with my notions. It may be that the point about time-travel holds but generalizing it to the lever issue fails.
How is your description of English as a compression format different from the idea of the detached lever, where one puts the characters a p p l e into a computer and hopes it will have crunchy, juicy properties?
I believe I speak Modern English, and could probably look for wavy hands on sticks penicillin mold or coil wires around magnets, but how does “atoms can be split” help me reproduce a major scientific/engineering discovery? It’s not a compressed instruction, it’s a teachers password I can say to other people who know that atoms can be split so we can be comfortably “scientific” in each other’s presence. I don’t know what it means in terms of equations, machinery, or testable predictions—and more to the point, - I still don’t know what it means after reading the t-shirt.
I could probably grope about in a corpse and find a heart or a lung, but how do I tell when I have a pancreas instead of a phlogistondix? And which bit of it is the pancreatic duct? And how do I tell if the fluid that comes out of the unknown lump of creature that I have is insulin? Or after injection, how to tell if it’s working?
The only constrained anticipation I have for ‘insulin’ is that it helps diabetic people—although I now note that I have no real idea what ‘diabetic people’ means in medical terms or how, if I were thrust back in time, I would be able to reliably identify them.
I suggest that t-shirt is not a compressed guide, it’s a memory aid for people who already know the details behind it and who could, if their memory was entirely under their command, manage exactly the same without it.
I agree with JoshuaZ, but would add:
English is a compression algorithm, but most of the information required for that algorithm is stored in your brain. Your brain hears the word “apple” and expands it to represent everything that you know about apples. If your brain can’t expand “pancreas” as far, that is a characteristic of your brain and not the word.
As is true of software compression algorithms, the purpose of your brain’s compression algorithm is to allow you to shrink the size of your knowledge and messages, at the cost of computing time and accuracy.
But these terms don’t exist in complete isolation. Say for example I’m sent back to 1850. Then I don’t know what the different parts of a pancreas look like, but doctors will know. So I can bootstrap my knowledge based on that (and presumably they know what a diabetic is and how to recognize them). Some of these (like using quartz crystals to make clocks) are difficult due to infrastructural problems, but most of them have large amounts of associated ideas that connect to the terms.
By analogy with the issue being discussed, the terms being used don’t function completely as detached levers, since when we have a written record of you saying “I like to eat apples but not oranges” we have a specific idea of what “apple” means.
Are you saying that once you have a written record of me mentioning apples, then you can talk to me about ‘apples’ with no explanation, but before that you would have to talk to me about ‘apples (which are …)’ with an explanation?
Hmm, ok. That can’t be right when phrased that way. So something is wrong with my notions. It may be that the point about time-travel holds but generalizing it to the lever issue fails.