Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

formulated an anthropocentric concept. And of course, if contact were

established with an alien civilization from another star system, we would

feel supported in our belief that our own type of intelligence is not just a

fluke, but an example of a basic form which reappears in nature in diverse

contexts, like stars and uranium nuclei. This in turn would support the idea

of meaning being an inherent property.

To conclude this topic, let us consider some new and old examples,

and discuss the degree of inherent meaning which they have, by putting

ourselves, to the extent that we can, in the shoes of an alien civilization

which intercepts a weird object ...

Two Plaques in Space

Consider a rectangular plaque made of an indestructible metallic alloy, on

which are engraved two dots, one immediately above the another: the

preceding colon shows a picture. Though the overall form of the object

might suggest that it is an artifact, and therefore that it might conceal some

message, two dots are simply not sufficient to convey anything. (Can you,

before reading on, hypothesize what they are supposed to mean?) But

suppose that we made a second plaque, containing more dots, as follows:

Now one of the most obvious things to do-so it might seem to a

terrestrial intelligence at least-would be to count the dots in the successive

rows. The sequence obtained is:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.

Here there is evidence of a rule governing the progression from one line to

the next. In fact, the recursive part of the definition of the Fibonacci

numbers can be inferred, with some confidence, from this list. Suppose we

think of the initial pair of values (1,1) as a "genotype" from which the

"phenotype"-the full Fibonacci sequence-is pulled out by a recursive

rule. By sending the genotype alone-namely the first version of the

plaque-we fail to send the information which allows reconstitution of the

phenotype. Thus, the genotype does not contain the full specification of

The Location of Meaning 173