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From: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: The meaning of language (information content)
Message-ID: <16090@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Fri, 10-Oct-86 18:52:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.16090
Posted: Fri Oct 10 18:52:26 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Oct-86 06:20:43 EDT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Tom Tedrick)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 18

>>	My simple point was that, for example, a language created by
>>some intelligent creatures who have all died out would become a
>>"meaningless" set of symbols (assuming that language consists of
>>strings of symbols or something of that nature.)  If humans were to
>>try to interpret that language, they would only have the barest chance.

>   This is what you believe.  However, since you offer no evidence or
>justification for this opinion, why do you expect others to accept it?
>Exactly the opposite seems true to me; 

Yes, this is a point which requires some technical knowledge
to understand.

There is bound to be some "information" (in the information-
theoretic sense) in the samples of the language that remain.
Cryptographers have frequently managed to break what were
thought to be impossibly difficult encoding schemes. There
are some very clever fellows in the "Cryptography Cabal" ...