Submission + - How to chat with an alien about Andy Weir? (arstechnica.com) 1
Complicated and long article, but quite interesting. I have a long "take" on it, but I want to keep this comment relatively short. Difficult...
I haven't read his first book, only "Artemis", which was pretty good though I didn't like the obvious "movie pitch" near the end. I have only read three of Cherryh's books, and the last one was decades ago. Being a stranger living in a strange land, none of the 15 or so library systems I checked had any of her books in the original English, and after decades of studying the local language, it would still be a major effort for me to read any of the translations. However I recently read an English version of "Usurper of the Sun" by Nojiri, which was a first contact book with a species predicated not to understand the concept of individuals, making communication quite difficult. (Some unlikable elements in that book, too.) And I've read and studied a bunch of Chomsky, even including some of his linguistics, though I'm only a dabbler in that field. I also dabble in medical topics and recently greatly enjoyed one of Damasio's books, but I'm lower than a dabbler in that field. Call it neurophysiology? But I started as a philosopher and even a wannabe epistemologist, and spent of lot of time trying to understand Godel (both the ideas and the man), so I say unto you "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter is a great book (and his strange loops book isn't bad, either). Just background. Now to my "conclusions" on language.
My "working premise" is that we are UTMs (Universal Turing Machines) and that all UTMs are fundamentally equal. (Is that our image of gawd?) The differences are basically the time required to solve various classes of problems, which is largely determined by the kinds of "mental programs" we are running in our punkin' heads. Many of those programs are "expressed" in hardware, including language and visual hardware. I think our species has brains that are especially compatible with running certain kinds of programs, but we are also UTMs, and the universal part means we can learn programs to solve any class of problems in the universe. Perhaps not in practice in terms of time, but at least in theory. One consequence (or the other way around?) is that I see each human language as a complete system defined within itself.
As it applies to this new book and movie project by Andy Weir, you must therefore color me skeptical. And good luck in explaining that sentence to his new alien species. Hardware-level incompatibilities not just at the level of sound systems, but in the kinds of programs that "run sufficiently easily" in the more dissimilar UTMs.
So does anyone have any leads to an author who might be working on (or have already written) about the Chinese Amazon grannies? "The Diamond Age" by Stephenson came kind of close with his army of Chinese Amazon teenage girls. I'm also seeking the cryocide crybabies... (Wow. Surprised I got so far in 502 words. But still much more could be said on such complicated topics and hopes.)
Pretty sure it isn't a dupe, but... (Score:2)
My comment may be a dupe from Ars Technica, but the story didn't seem to have prior mention on Slashdot. Not sure if it's relevant to the editors of Slashdot, but I'm also likely to recycle the same comment if it does get used as a story on Slashdot. But perhaps it would be more suitable as an Ask Slashdot piece on the topic of communication?
But I think there will be a lot of TL;DR reactions. My 500 words are too much for most of them, but the Ars Technica story was much longer, including a long interview w