The Location of Meaning
Monday, December 31st, 2001 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydThoughts from Chapter VI, "Location of Meaning," in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Hofstadter suggests that, if an internal message is interpreted by the same type of process by every intelligence, the meaning can be said to be in the message. If different intelligences have widely different processes for interpreting inner messages, the meaning is not in the message, but is imparted by the interplay between message and extraction.
However, Hofstadter doesn't address at all messages which have multiple meanings. Linguistic double entendre and poetry are some of the finest examples, but countless forms exist. One might be challenged to write a string which is accepted as a program in two different languages, C and bash, say. Perl poetry is in a similar vein. But to create a less elegant example, consider interpreting sentences as numbers by starting at zero and adding one for each letter that goes below the baselice or above the midline and subtracting one for each letter that stays within the bounds. The meaning of this clause, for instance, is -4. Thus, one can extract myriad meanings from a message. The challenge is often to extract the intended meaning; understanding what the sender meant to say. But is the intended meaning in the message? No. To interpret a message, we necessarily make assumptions about the sender and her context; she intends the sentence to be interpreted as English using word connotations in common use in the present.
And what about intentionally vague messages? Many beautiful lines of poetry, all of which escape me for the moment, are written with full knowledge of multiple possible interpretation. This is even more pronounced in the nonverbal arts. Hofstadter even uses a Bach record as an example, stating that the meaning of the record is the emotions it evokes, suggesting that if it invokes the same emotions in alien intelligence as it does in us, the meaning is localized in the record. But music notoriously evokes different emotions in different people, and even in the same person at different times. An mp3 can evoke different emotions if played aurally or through a visual plug in on mute.
The context of both the sender and receiver are of major importance to meaning. Removing a sentence's context famously invites misinterpretations, even when all of the interpretations share method. (I am thinking, for instance, of John Lennon's statement "We're bigger than Jesus." On its own, it sounds like a statement of personal aggrandizement, of ego supreme. When taken in its original context, that there was a problem -- kids would rather listen The Beatles than go to church, it's a very humble and perceptive statement.) Furthermore, the receiver's context teases out meaning which the author could not have intended, but which is nonetheless valid. Today a reader of ancient philosophy can extract meanings relevant to technologies and structures of which the ancients had no conception.
Hofstadter suggests that, if an internal message is interpreted by the same type of process by every intelligence, the meaning can be said to be in the message. If different intelligences have widely different processes for interpreting inner messages, the meaning is not in the message, but is imparted by the interplay between message and extraction.
However, Hofstadter doesn't address at all messages which have multiple meanings. Linguistic double entendre and poetry are some of the finest examples, but countless forms exist. One might be challenged to write a string which is accepted as a program in two different languages, C and bash, say. Perl poetry is in a similar vein. But to create a less elegant example, consider interpreting sentences as numbers by starting at zero and adding one for each letter that goes below the baselice or above the midline and subtracting one for each letter that stays within the bounds. The meaning of this clause, for instance, is -4. Thus, one can extract myriad meanings from a message. The challenge is often to extract the intended meaning; understanding what the sender meant to say. But is the intended meaning in the message? No. To interpret a message, we necessarily make assumptions about the sender and her context; she intends the sentence to be interpreted as English using word connotations in common use in the present.
And what about intentionally vague messages? Many beautiful lines of poetry, all of which escape me for the moment, are written with full knowledge of multiple possible interpretation. This is even more pronounced in the nonverbal arts. Hofstadter even uses a Bach record as an example, stating that the meaning of the record is the emotions it evokes, suggesting that if it invokes the same emotions in alien intelligence as it does in us, the meaning is localized in the record. But music notoriously evokes different emotions in different people, and even in the same person at different times. An mp3 can evoke different emotions if played aurally or through a visual plug in on mute.
The context of both the sender and receiver are of major importance to meaning. Removing a sentence's context famously invites misinterpretations, even when all of the interpretations share method. (I am thinking, for instance, of John Lennon's statement "We're bigger than Jesus." On its own, it sounds like a statement of personal aggrandizement, of ego supreme. When taken in its original context, that there was a problem -- kids would rather listen The Beatles than go to church, it's a very humble and perceptive statement.) Furthermore, the receiver's context teases out meaning which the author could not have intended, but which is nonetheless valid. Today a reader of ancient philosophy can extract meanings relevant to technologies and structures of which the ancients had no conception.
