Re: virus: Undecipherable Brettisms (was: Faith and Certainty)

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Wed, 10 Jun 1998 21:25:11 -0400


Hi,

Lena Rotenberg <lrr@netkonnect.net> wrote:
> Is it _your_ obligation to try to understand my Portuguese
> verbiage, or is it _my_ obligation to use language that is
> conducive to getting my meaning across to this group?

The latter, of course.

As you guys might remember, I've taken up a project to read the Virus
archives. My current status is "Mon Dec 16 10:59:57 1996", or what I
figure must be 3000 or so messages in. The reason I'm posting here is that
this is reminding me of a discussion I just read through where Eva-Lise
talked about communication.

She pointed out, although with a different analogy than I will use here,
that *meaning* per-see is not "encoded" into our communications. Having
just read Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker" and Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous
Idea", I'm currently awash in biological metaphors, so here goes... meaning
can be likened to phenotypes, but communication is always in the form of
genotypes, and so what happens is that individuals, in attempting to
communicate, reduce their "meanings" (i.e. the effects they wish to have)
into the code of language (the genotype), and send it out. Then, the
receiver picks it up, and puts it into their decoder, and attempts to
*rebuild* the phenotype from the genotype that was communicated.
Unfortunately, because everybody has different readers, it frequently
happens that the *new* phenotype is a "monster", or is simply dead...
(i.e. there are many more ways of rebuilding the communication which do not
make sense (dead), or are incorrect (monsters), than there are to come away
with what was intended (specific living creature)).

I would maintain that although Brett obviously is attempting to
communicate, his own encoders and decoders are so different from ours that
not only can we not make a specific living species out of the instructions,
we can't even make monsters most of the time!

Towards the synthesis of knowledge into wisdom...
ERiC
... and if I'd made a monster of your long forgotten post, Eva, be sure to
point it out!

... oh, one last thing. In about two days, I'll be compiling my list of
best posts to Virus through '96, and I'll forward a web address to Virus at
that time. Then I guess we can debate over which actually go to the "top
100" or whatever... I have included quite a number of posts which I think
we could cull, and I'm interested to see if you all agree.