Multisense Realism

Excerpts from Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (via Occam’s Beard)

What makes us see a frame message in certain objects, but none in others? Why should an alien civilization suspect, if they intercept an errant record, that a message lurks within? What should make a record any different from a meteorite? Clearly its geometric shape is the first clue that “something funny is going on”. The next clue is that, on a more microscopic scale, it consists of a very long aperiodic sequence of patters, arranged in a spiral. If we were to unwrap the spiral, we would have one huge linear sequence (around 2000 feet long) of minuscule symbols. This is not so different from a DNA molecule, whose symbols, drawn from a meager “alphabet” of four different chemical bases, are arrayed in a one-dimensional sequence, and then coiled up into a helix. Before Avery had established the connection between genes and DNA, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger predicted, on purely theoretical grounds, that genetic information would have to be stored in “aperiodic crystals”, in his influential book What is Life? In fact, books themselves are aperiodic crystals contained inside neat geometrical forms. These examples suggest that, where an aperiodic crystal is found “packaged” inside a very regular geometric structure, there may lurk an inner message.

The three levels are very clear in the case of a message found in a bottle washed up on a beach. The first level, the frame message, is found when one picks up the bottle and sees that it is sealed, and contains a dry piece of paper. Even without seeing writing, one recognizes this type of artifact as an information-bearer, and at this point it would take an extraordinary—almost inhuman—lack of curiosity, to drop the bottle and not look further. Next, one opens the bottle and examines the marks on the paper. Perhaps they are Japanese: this can be discovered without any recognition of the inner message being understood—it merely comes from a recognition of the characters. The outer message can be stated as an English sentence: “I am in Japanese.” Once this has been discovered, then one can proceed to the inner message, which may be a call for help, a haiku poem, a lover’s lament…

It would be of no use to include in the inner message a translation of the sentence “This message is in Japanese”, since it would take someone who knew Japanese to read it. And before reading it, he would have to recognize the fact that, as it is in Japanese, he can read it. You might try to wriggle out of this by including translations of the statement “This message is in Japanese” into many different languages. That would help in a practical sense, but in a theoretical sense the same difficulty is there. An English-speaking person still has to recognize the “Englishness” of the message; otherwise it does no good. Thus one cannot avoid the problems that one has to find out how to decipher the inner message from the outside; the inner message itself may provide clues and confirmations, but those are at best triggers acting upon the bottle finder (or upon the people whom he enlists to help).

Similar kinds of problem confront the shortwave radio listener. First, he has to decide whether the sounds he hears actually constitute a message, or are just static. The sounds in themselves do not give the answer, not even in the unlikely case that the inner message is in the listener’s own native language, and is saying, “These sounds actually constitute a message and are not just static!” If the listener recognizes a frame message in the sounds, then he tries to identify the language the broadcast is in— and clearly, he is still on the outside; he accepts triggers from the radio, but they cannot explicitly tell him the answer.

It is in the nature of outer messages that they are not conveyed in any explicit language. To find an explicit language in which to convey outer messages would not be a breakthrough— it would be a contradiction in terms! It is always the listener’s burden to understand the outer message. Success lets him break through into the inside, at which point the ratio of triggers to explicit meanings shifts drastically towards the latter. By comparison with the previous stages, understand the inner message seems effortless. It is as if it just gets pumped in.

Commentary:

In multisense realism, I think of the three levels of GEB semiotics not as absolutes of frame, outer, and inner, but as relative frames of increasingly inner qualities. The bottle is read optically (inner to your visual experience but outer to your body and self), the text is read optically and typographically (inner to your semiotic experience but outer to your ‘self’) and the message is understood linguistically and cognitively (inner to your conscious mental experience or executive/self awareness but outer to your visual experience and absent from your body experience). The letters are more outer to your mind than the words, but not as outer as the optics available through your eyes. It’s all sensory experience and it is all inner, outer, and frame relative to different levels of participation. All sense is a frame making, breaking, and preserving experience which recontextualizes other frames as inner and outer.