Arrival (2016)

This movie was a glorified doctor who episode, does not get my approval 

  On 11/16/2016 at 3:07 AM, dr lopez said:

the linguistics shit was actually really frustrating... why not just draw them a fucking picture?? especially when she is lecturing the army n00bs to keep it "simple" doesn't get more simple than a fucking pictogram / visual representation of the noun. stick figure with alien touching. we are friends! easy fuckin picture to draw and it conveys much more information that "louise." the idea that the simplest communication would be her name which is a completely meaningless assortment of stylized lines that we have been told are "letters" that run in a certain direction that individually contain their own meaning and yet together have a different meaning!!!!!!!! that is a lot to explain!!!!!!!

lol yeah. there is that. i guess it's hard to ask questions between species with pictures though.

 

also the reasoning for them showing up in the first place seems a bit thin.

actually i don't see how pictures would really help at all so nevermind

I am not sure pictures would be as universal as you may think, many are based on human culture. For example why would you expect a crude picture of a human touching the alien mean to them 'friendship', for them it could mean a challenge to a fight or something

Edited November 16, 2016 by azatoth

well they dont know what anything means! also a bit bullcrap that these insanely advanced aliens can't start figuring out english and its up to amy adams to figure out their language. more i think about this i'm getting frustrated

  On 11/16/2016 at 7:25 AM, azatoth said:

I am not sure pictures would be as universal as you may think, many are based on human culture. For example why would you expect a crude picture of a human touching the alien mean to them 'friendship', for them it could mean a challenge to a fight or something

50-60 years ago there was an explosion in philosophy and science where we realized that we were rather egregiously taking for granted many aspects of being human. We learned this during the cybernetics boom, when we went to make robots that interact with the environment, assuming that visual perception is basically "receive light from the environment, and the shapes and forms and meaning and boundaries are naturally encoded in that information, and we merely passively receive it."

 

Well, a big fucking nope on that, and thus was born "the frame problem."

 

Turns out, the reason we use nearly half our brain to process visual information is because we have to impose shapes and forms and meaning and boundaries on the incoming data, because it's not there to begin with.

 

How would aliens perceive the world? Depends on what sorts of selection pressures they were adapted to. (e.g. The reason we can't perceive magnetic fields is because it wasn't a differential pressure on us)

 

But they might simply perceive the environment as a spectrum of red-to-blue based on threat detection and utility, and then maybe they parse the fine grain details ("is this food or something to have alien sex with?") with something akin to a sense of smell.

 

 

 

So the assumption that a drawing would naturally convey the sorts of information we would think is not correct.

Edited November 16, 2016 by LimpyLoo

  On 11/16/2016 at 3:07 AM, dr lopez said:

the linguistics shit was actually really frustrating... why not just draw them a fucking picture?? especially when she is lecturing the army n00bs to keep it "simple" doesn't get more simple than a fucking pictogram / visual representation of the noun. stick figure with alien touching. we are friends! easy fuckin picture to draw and it conveys much more information that "louise." the idea that the simplest communication would be her name which is a completely meaningless assortment of stylized lines that we have been told are "letters" that run in a certain direction that individually contain their own meaning and yet together have a different meaning!!!!!!!! that is a lot to explain!!!!!!! 

 

LOL yeah draw a stick person and an alien with a heart emoji in the middle right!!

 

You might have to manipulate gravity or heat or electromagnetism to communicate with them.

 

Now, I actually think you could figure out what to say without knowing their language: I think you would have to construct a sort-of universal archetypal language stemming from the interaction of Order (i.e. "Where you know how to act to predictably get what you want") and Chaos (e.g. "Where you don't" ).

 

...Or some other sort of 'fortune-misfortune' dichotomy based on the likely-true-presumption that organisms pre-require goals or preferences in order to act within any given environment.

 

 

So maybe you'd send regular and hyper-precise pulses of thermal or electromagnetic information at the alien dude, signaling that it's a predictable environment. (But of course why the fuck should it believe you?)

 

Whatever it might look like, it would have to stem from a shared relationship to the universe, and very likely that would be some really basic shit.

Edited November 16, 2016 by LimpyLoo

  On 11/13/2016 at 11:43 AM, azatoth said:

it had some ideas which fascinate me (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

In The Language Instinct Steven Pinker (by way of Chomsky) laid a big heaping turd on this hypothesis.  It's been years since I read it, but he works up a great basis of knowledge that makes it seem silly to think language influences thinking whatsoever.  It's the other way around.

 

The only rebuttal to Pinker's claim (that I'm aware of) is "well universal grammar is not falsifiable" which is pretty damning, as intriguing as Chomsky's studies are.  The field is young, so I feel just hopeless about some really fundamental problems in linguistics and cognitive science.

 

Anyway, the book is a great read.

Edited November 17, 2016 by Rpeg