Turns out the aliens all speak Esperanto
So no one on Earth can communicate with them? Damn.
That’s a flaccid penis.
The universal language we will use to communicate with aliens.
So we will have no way of communicating with them if they’re hot?
Exactly.
Maybe interpretative striptease.
Looks like a testicular torsion incantation
People always say that, but like… what does that actually mean? Like we could work from first principles and just build a system of communication based on math?
Gotta say I have my doubts. I have no idea what alien cognition would be like.
Counting is kind of basic. From one-two-three you can get fairly quicky to yes-no, and then comparisons, and with yes/no/more/less/same you have enough to fuzzle out whatever squak gigors.
Aliens we could talk to at all wouldn’t be cthulu or q. They would live in the same basic reality we do, with entropy and gravity and the same elemetnts and stars. (They WOULD likely see different colors than we do, unless their sun was the same temperature as Sol and their planet the same size as earth)
what if they don’t have the concept of atomic concepts: there’s no such thing as “one” because everything can be divided, until you reach wave/particle duality in which case there’s no singular state anyway? There’s no such thing as “two” because there can be no dividing line between phenomena that have no external nor internal boundaries? What if they cannot see or hear but use other senses we have no names for? What if they are a hive mind and don’t predate and thus have no concept of consent or denial/acceptance, and thus no concept of yes/no?
What are we seeing here?
I believe they are higher dimensional string diagrams. Maybe called n-diagrams? They are used in higher homotopy and higher category theory, I believe. But not entirely sure.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.06938
EDIT: Found it! they are called surface diagram, which are generalization of string diagram to 3-categories https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/03/modeling_surface_diagrams.html https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/surface+diagram
Still not sure what the proof is talking about though :(
But from the conclusion it looks like some sort of natruality condition, where the morphisms are slided around except beta.
EDIT AGAIN: got in touch with my string diagram contact. Here is the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.0658
Note the conclusion at the bottom, the proof on the right and the axiom on the left doesn’t seem to be related.
The proof on the right is Theorem 6; the equality at bottom is in section 3.4, where the proof is omitted because “follows from definition”; the axiom on the left is HM1 and HM2 on page 19.
Yoooo! 3D string diagrams
Is this some sort of loss i’m too dumb to get?
I think it’s funny to think of mathematics as a universal language because all of formal logic is built on the assumption that binary truth values are grounded in reality, but I believe that has yet to be proven. All of human communication functions based on an assumed shared context.
If I say I have an apple, and you say you have an apple, humans would say that together we have two apples but in reality we each have an estimated collection of matter that shares nothing physically in common with the other. Maybe other intelligent life forms don’t make the same assumptions that we do that lead to the statement that there are two “apples,” and maybe mathematics isn’t universal.
I guess I mean to say that formal logic and mathematics are not grounded in reality, but are grounded in the way that a human brain perceives reality.
First of all, there has been a lot of research into what the minimal set of assumptions you need is to reproduce what we consider “basic math” and also what happens if you tweak those assumptions.
Second of all, the main goal for science and the type of math we use for science is to effectively model the world we live in.
Any aliens that live in the same universe are subject to the same physics, and any civilization advanced enough to detect our messages will know some basic universal facts about the world, and those facts are what we hope to use as the basis for starting communication.
Yeah you’re right, the main goal of science and the math we use for science is to model the universe. That model is completely subjective. The more we learn about the universe, the more the model changes. The way we learn is limited by our 5 senses and our mental models for the immediate universe around us.
That model is something of a language itself, and if a language is subjectively limited then I don’t think it can be universal
The model we currently have for the universe goes well beyond anything we could learn with our natural senses and the way we intuitively think about the world because of those senses.
It’s true that we keep refining our models and it’s very possible that an alien would have slightly different models, but at the end of the day, we are trying to describe the same universe and those models are going to overlap a lot because of that.
Who else saw it?
