The Contact Lingo Problem
See also:  [Back to the SF-FILM page]
           [SF index]
           [SF General] 
           [LITERATURE INDEX]
       [The ALT LIST!] (ah, those literary weirdos!)
                   [terms] (index of indexes)
SF Film
                      THE FILMS

On this page:  {Stuff}
               {B/G}
               {2001}
                          
{Back to the TOP of this Page}

  

Stuff

Some years ago (probably around 1975 or so; using HP-2000 
Basic), i created a  computer game "lingo" which would give 
you a sample of an alien text and you would try (based on 
clues as to where the text was found, and the circumstances
underwhich it was found. You would then try keywords to
try to deciphere more of the message. If your keywords
were "close" then more of the text would be revealed,
if futher away (colder), then the message would revert
to fljsfjoweuweojwofjwoju3u20248j24oojo4jl4*)*(*))*)(*\

sorts of things. It worked well, and was pretty much just
a "guessing" game to make people think (see map).

Anyway,.... here we all are some 30+ years later... 


{Back to the TOP of this Page}

  

b/g


Ref: Karl Wessel put it in "Alien Encounters:
SF and the Mysteriusm in 2001, Solaris, and Contact",
(Pp.202-205, in "The Science Fiction Film Reader,
ed. by Gregg Rickman, LCCN PN'1995.9'.S26'R53'2004,
ISBN 0.87910.944.7 (Limelight, New York, 2004).


BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE

NOTE: Freely re-formated into mini-paragrphs, etc.

Jean-Francois Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian 
hieroglphics and Michael Ventris' of Linear-B, the
language of ancient Minoan Crete, are rightly counted
among the most remarkable and difficult accomplishments
of the human mind, yet these men were dealing with the
languages of memebers of their own species with whom
they shared an evolutionary heritabe billions of years
long. In a book he co-authored with the Russian astronomer
I.S. Shklovski in 1966, Carl Sagan once proposed to 
bridge the evolutionary gulf between beings born of
different worlds by using the supposed universal 
language or lingua franca of maths. He said:

  We wish to emphasise that a linguistic system 
  based upon these fundamentals would be far 
  easier to decipher than many of the written
  languages of ancient civilisations that have 
  been deciphered by arachaeologists. [LOCAL NOTE 30,
  Shklovski & Sagan, "Intellegent Life in the Universe",
  1966, P.430]

This is quite false. What's worse, it's naievly anthro-po-centric.
The error of this kind of ill-informed enthusaiasm (!)
was perhaps put most succinctly by the philosopher 
David Lamb:

  The major problem with Lincos and other basic
  languages (designed to communicate with ET's)
  is that no message, no matter how simple, can 
  carry its own interpretation: Symbols in 
  themselves are meaningless and are not 
  self-explanatory, require-ing an interpretive
  framework and a shared background of tacit knowledge.
  [Note 2] [LOCAL NOTE 32,
  David Lamb, "The Search for ETI: A Philosophical
  Inquiry (New York: Routledge, 2001), P. 33.

[Note 1]

A series of deep results in mathematical logic and the 
philosopher of language indicate the labyrinthine nature of
the problem that Sagan and Shklovski treated so cavalierly
in their book. 

The first, which Ludwig Wittgenstein had already disuccsed

END BLOCK QUOTE


{Back to the TOP of this page}

NOTES (this section only)

[1] In a remarkable SF story ??author?? scientists 
    land on Mars, and find it long since deserted
by an advanced race. All they need to do is to find
a *single* clue to their languge to decode it. The
point of the story is that they are all *linguists*
and not until a young member of the team finds a
periodic chart and realises its significance does
the *key* become apparent. Of course this two is
rather anthro-po-centric. What if they (the "martians"
use a rather intuitive approach to knowledge -- they
might "use" chemistry without knowing anything of
the under-laying principles; ie, the atomic theory
which gives us the "layout" of the periodic table.

{Back to the TEXT}



[2] For example, a carefully written bit of message
    might be "deemed" a tasty treat or simply art-work
by an alien. In fact in one of Sheckly's Stories ??title??
the *gestures* of humans put the aliens into a kind of
trance. And along that way, our gestures might be seen
as a form of dance. (Similar to (i think) Clarke's 
story where-in an essential part of the Dolphin's 
language is *dance*; also refer to the h2g2 of course).

Thus, the possibility of "missing" the signifcance
of various gestures or text, etc. is high. Also, 
refer to Desmond Morris' "Manwatching" (anthro of
gestures, etc).

{Back to the TEXT}


Next: zzz.

{Back to the TOP of this page}

  

zzz