Matt: 0:14

Hello everyone And welcome to the switch statement podcast It's a podcast for investigations into miscellaneous tech topics

Jon: 0:21

This is our 10th episode on Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

Matt: 0:31

Hey, John, how you doing?

Jon: 0:32

Hey Matt, I'm doing? good. How are you?

Matt: 0:35

I am doing all right. Let's get right into it. Talking about levels of meaning.

Jon: 0:41

Yep, we're Talking about levels of meaning. Communication is a strong theme here. Uh, and my top note in this section was that math is the most useful form of communication. Because he discusses

Matt: 0:56

ones and zeros,

Jon: 0:58

Why, why not? Yeah. I mean, well, he talks about the whole, you know, would Bach sound cool to an alien race and on the one hand it might because it is very, you know, it's based on real things. Like you mentioned in the last chapter, an octave being like, you know, a doubling of the frequency. I can imagine a lot of aliens evolving. Being able to tell when frequencies are doubled, which humans evidently evolved that ability for some reason. I don't know why

Matt: 1:32

Yeah.

Jon: 1:32

But in any case if an alien also evolved that in in parallel or wherever they live in the universe Then Bach might sound good to them

Matt: 1:41

I had a biology teacher who one time was like, do you think aliens have the same. DNA. And I was like, it's all physics, right? Like it's just, and so my, my hypothesis was yes. Like I thought that like, Aliens would all have the same DNA. Um, because it's like, based on these physical relationships, Um, but anyway, I mean, we didn't come to any conclusion then he didn't, you know, he didn't say I was right or wrong, but,

Jon: 2:10

There is an element of that. It's like, you know, there's one periodic table throughout the entire universe and some Elements are just better at certain things. Like proteins are very good at kind of encoding info and interacting with other proteins and having this like permutative power of, uh, you know, being able to represent information and like capabilities. um, and, and also biological materials are good at replicating. It's like, there's a reason we're not made out of tungsten.

Matt: 2:43

Right, right.

Jon: 2:44

the, the elements

Matt: 2:46

Which is like the bonding behavior. You know, it just arises out of these lights. And. I guess the question for me becomes, and I don't have the answer to this is like, yeah. How many different ways could that have shaken out? Cause it feels like there's a certain level of complexity, which is like, it was just random chance that. That we happened to wind up with this one.

Jon: 3:06

Yeah, well, I mean, and then, you know, you look at how we build computers like silicon, you know, we, we compress silicon into these wafers and then we etch metal onto them in order to like leverage electricity and send signals. Can totally imagine an alien evolving in that way. But the issue is like, you need these natural processes to be able to result in that. Which, you know, we use like industrial fabrication in order to do that. So it's, I don't know, it seems like it's not inconceivable that some natural process could arise at that, but it's, you know, it sounds a lot more difficult than just using like proteins and, you know, carbon and simple elements that combine with simple chemistry. Um, But he gets into the levels of info, which is kind of like the definition of the chapter where you have these three levels of information. The first level he refers to as the frame message, which is basically, it's basically raw data, but just by looking at the data, you recognize that there's a need to decode it.

Matt: 4:23

Right.

Jon: 4:24

Like, for instance, white noise. A human being can't hear white noise and think like, Oh, this means something, you know, a human being just kind of immediately discards that as, as meaningless. But if you hear a Mozart piece, it is, there's an organization to it. There's, there's motifs. There's like, you know, volume control and things. There's all these things that like, sort of tell you a story and you sort of come to the conclusion that like, Oh, you know, I need to interpret this. Uh, so, okay, the second level is the outer message, which the outer message, uh, is where you need the correct decoder.

Matt: 5:05

Right.

Jon: 5:06

Um, and then the third level is the inner message, which is the intended meaning of the, of the, uh, original data. So in the case of Bach, you know, he's intending you to like feel emotion and feel, you know, this human togetherness or collective or whatever. And an alien might not feel that way.

Matt: 5:26

Right. And I like, I view the inner message and maybe this is just a restatement of what you said, but it's like, it's literally the subjective experience of like understanding the message.

Jon: 5:36

Yeah. Well, that's a thing that there's so much that can be embedded into this inner message. Like for a lot of our modern culture, you sort of need an understanding of history in order to interpret, you know, modern culture. Like he mentions a John Cage piece where it's basically just a bunch of operators sitting at a bunch of dials, and they like move the dials basically randomly, and each dial controls the volume of a recording. So what the listener hears is this like random tapestry of different recordings that are like going in and out. Which actually sounds like pure chaos.

Matt: 6:14

Yeah.

Jon: 6:15

But, like, John Cage's point in doing this was to sort of convey just sound. Like, he wanted to create a piece that, you know, moved away from this, like, structure, from this, like, meaning That's encoded into music. He wanted to create a piece that was like a new thing, just the conveyance of sound. But in order to even understand that, you need to have the sound. You need to like know this context.

Matt: 6:41

you're saying like, you need to have the context of what standard music sounds like to appreciate.

Jon: 6:48

it's sort of like those artists who just, you know, they would just like paint a canvas white and everyone would be like, this is amazing.

Matt: 6:56

So subversive.

Jon: 6:57

Yeah. exactly. It's amazing because art was. You know, for years and years was trying to like represent reality perfectly, you know, and then people like, like Sarat or whatever started doing pointillism it's not an exact mapping of reality. He's like doing this interesting visual thing with reality and like, oh, that's a new thing. But in order to like get pointillism, you have to have some of the, that historical context.

Matt: 7:23

Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's true.

Jon: 7:25

Yeah. He, he mentions. this Schrodinger thing, which I thought was interesting. I did not know this, but apparently Schrodinger wrote a book called, What is Life? I think that's what it was called. And he mentions this concept of an aperiodic crystal, which is, you know, you don't think of a crystal as being aperiodic, because you think of a crystal as this like, highly organized structure but Schrodinger talks about how life can be represented as this aperiodic crystal basically a non repeating Series of data, and He just mentions that that concept aperiodic crystals is this Valuable way of encoding information and I just jotted down You Uh, large language model embeddings, because I feel like there's some similarity here where large language models, you know, they convey meaning, uh, within these like long vectors of floating point numbers, you know, you might have a vector that's like 2000 numbers long, and that refers to like red. You know, or, or it has some underlying meaning, but if you just look at the vector, it's just this insane string of numbers.

Matt: 8:43

Right. I don't know. You know how closely this ties to, uh,. A periodic crystals, but, um, Yeah. It's like, it only has meaning in so far as it. Like relates to other embeddings in this, in this space. Um,

Jon: 9:01

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: 9:03

then, so he does, he does start to try to like break down these two competing conceptions of. Like theories of meanings, which is like the jukebox theory, which is. Whether or not, you know, it's, you know, going back to there with, we talked about this in our last episode, that life. If you have two jukeboxes, like, or, you know, you can play two different songs with the same underlying content. And like, so that's kind of like the conception where. There is no. Real underlying meaning. Um, and. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I guess I think that, that, that feels more true to me. That, um, That it's really all about interpretation and. There isn't necessarily one right way to. You know, to, to play a record, so to speak.

Jon: 10:01

totally. It's yeah, I agree. Especially in the context of, you know, of something like music, which is obviously super subjective. Um, and it sort of goes back to being, or to our point earlier, which is like math is really the only universal thing. Like, this chapter made me think a lot about the golden record, which was, you know, this record that we sent out on Voyager, which is this probe that we sent out in like the seventies or something. And now it's like outside of the solar system at this point, it's like super far away, but anyway, we have this golden record on that probe. And the point is like, if an alien recovers that probe, they'll have this golden record that has all this information on it. And it's interesting to look at what information the scientists decided to put on there. And this was like a big project. Carl Sagan was involved. A couple other scientists were involved in, uh, uh, human, uh, what is it called when you study humanity?

Matt: 11:02

Semiotics or yeah. Oh yeah.

Jon: 11:05

Yeah. Oh, symbol. Yeah. Yeah. Semiotics is like the, uh, the study of like symbols. Right.

Matt: 11:10

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon: 11:11

Yeah, so there's probably some of them too. But anyway, uh, didn't mean for this to be such a long thing, but like a lot of the stuff that they put on the Golden Disk was this like universal stuff. Like they put literally like math equations, you know, they, they, I should have looked this up because I don't remember exactly what they put, but I think one of the things had like, a dot, a single dot, and then they had like the number one next to it and then two dots and the number two next to it. And then they would say like one plus one equals two. So they were kind of like using these utterly basic things that even an alien might understand, um, because they were these utterly universal things like math. Um, oh and I'm just now remembering one other thing they had. in that golden disk, which is a diagram of the hydrogen atom. You know, and it's like, even an alien civilization probably would have discovered hydrogen. Maybe not helium, because humans only discovered helium in like the 70s. But uh, but hydrogen at least.

Matt: 12:15

Which, which in a way, it kind of flies in the face of what I was just saying where it's like, there aren't two ways to interpret the golden record.

Jon: 12:23

Right,

Matt: 12:24

It's like if they, if they put it in their Dropbox and like, they parsed the hydrogen atom and they were like, oh, like it started to play Bach when it looked at that little it's like, no, that's not what. That's not what we meant to convey.

Jon: 12:41

Right,

Matt: 12:41

This is a really hairy topic in today's world, but it's like, You start to get into the concept of truth, I think, there's not one right way to interpret the message. You can like get a meaning from something that the artists like never intended to put there by like playing the record backwards.

Jon: 12:59

oh yeah.

Matt: 13:00

You know, but I think that You could just be wrong. You know what I mean? Like there's ways in which I can just be wrong.

Jon: 13:06

well, I was just going to bring up fake news because I feel like, you know, in today's culture, there's this concept of fake news. I don't know why I'm explaining fake news. Everyone knows what that is. But anyway, what fake news is a lot of the time is the same underlying facts. It's like the same underlying information. But the person presenting the information is presenting it in this very, very biased way. You know, for instance, it's a lie. Trump just got convicted of like, I don't even know what it was, like 40 counts of fraud or something. His conveyance of that information is that we live in a rigged system where, you know, the American legal system is out to get him because he represents this like maverick whatever. But another interpretation of that information is the guy committed fraud.

Matt: 13:56

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a perfect example. I think, um,

Jon: 14:01

yeah, it's just interesting how we live in this society where truth is no longer based on facts. You know, I think it used to be that powerful people would try to control facts, and I think powerful people have realized today that they can't control facts. Facts are gonna get out, but they can control narrative. And that's what is, that's what we're in today, is this sort of narrative control, which goes back to that whole decoding concept, uh, that I, that I find so interesting, where it's like, if you apply a different decoder to the same set of facts, you can basically result in any narrative you want.

Matt: 14:39

I think what's happening. Like you're saying, like, if we're just looking at the statement, you know, someone is like, Trump was convicted of 34. Felony counts. So one person who still has faith in the criminal justice system in the United States, they might take that to mean like, oh, Trump. Committed a crime. You know, and then another person who has just had their, their faith just completely shaken in the system is like, oh no, this is just a kangaroo court, basically. And, it's meaningless. And like that's, that's I think the heart of the jukebox theory where you, you know, it's the same. Stimulus. But it's two totally different contexts.

Jon: 15:26

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's, and it's this spectrum, cause there's even people that believe, you know, they still believe in the justice system, but they just think the charges were trumped up, uh, no pun intended. But, you know, basically that presidents commit minor, you know, crimes all the time, or, you know, politicians commit minor fraud all the time. It's just part of, part of being a politician. And it's sort of ridiculous to like. Target someone and, you know, bring these charges that, it's almost like hypocritical in a way because, you know, the whole everyone's doing it argument

Matt: 16:04

I hate that so much.

Jon: 16:06

It's like when Blagojevich was selling Obama's vacant Senate seat and his defense was basically like, everyone's doing it, which is like the dumbest defense

Matt: 16:18

the weakest. Yeah.

Jon: 16:20

But I've heard, you know, I have a lot of liberal friends, like, I guess I'll admit that I'm a liberal, who interpret the Biden conviction similarly, you know, Biden's son got convicted for purchasing a weapon while he was a drug addict, but a lot of people, I've heard a lot of people say like, oh, that was, that's ancient history, like, you know, no one got hurt, like, you know, This is a witch hunt. It's absurd to, like, chase a guy down, whatever, decades after he bought a gun. Like, it's just such an obscure crime. Um, and so, yeah, there's all sorts of narrative building around these different sets of facts.

Matt (2): 17:01

It's funny at the risk of just like completely going off the rails. Um, like there's, I think there's two layers here, which is like, There's the legal layer where it's like, Did did someone commit a crime by the, you know, the letter of the law? And then there's like the moral layer, which is like, How serious of an offense is that, you know, those are two kind of different layers It's funny because at the legal layer, it's like, yeah. Uh, hunter Biden, lied on a form where he said he wasn't a drug addict and it's by all accounts. He, he was a drug addict. You know, uh, But it's the same thing is true of Trump where it's like, you know, he falsified business records to like to hide this salacious. News story from, from getting out like, yeah. And that's, and that's a crime it's like, yeah, people are falsifying business records all the time and they're like, oh, like everybody's doing it. It's still a crime. Uh, so, um, but, the thing is, how major of a moral failing that is, it's like, I just feel like Trump's. Crime is way more indicative of. a moral. Failure than hunter Biden, where it's like, okay, hunter Biden. He sounds like he's got a lot of problems. like like he's, Like I'm not gonna sit here and defend. The hunter Biden, but, it just feels like apples and oranges.

Jon: 18:25

Yeah, and this, this gets into a concept that I, that I really wanted to mention from this chapter, which is, he, he talks about earth chauvinism,

Matt: 18:33

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon: 18:35

um, and he gives an interesting history to this where, you know, human, human beings came up with this concept of weight, which is basically how much you weigh, but we didn't realize that weight isn't a real thing. It's real, obviously, but weight is basically mass's relationship with gravity, where it's like, you know, the reason we weigh what we weigh is because the earth is the mass that it is, and we are the mass that we are, and if we go to the moon, then we'll weigh a fraction of what we weigh on earth because the moon is so much less massive than earth. But if you think of weight as this, like, true concept, that's a very earth chauvinistic way of thinking. And I think we have very, you know, there's similar, similar things, uh, with like liberals and conservatives where there's like liberal chauvinism, which is this interpretation of facts that like, Oh, Hunter Biden is just a troubled drug addict and it's, it's unfair to go after him for, you know, buying a gun or whatever. And, but, but Trump on the other hand. actually committed fraud like while he was trying to become president, which is arguably a worse crime. Um, but you could also argue that that's this like liberal chauvinism where this is the decoder that we use for the same information. And anyway, I just thought that was, I don't mean to apply everything to politics, which is evidently what we're doing this episode, but I, I just feel like that whole chauvinism concept. Uh, is really interesting because it's, uh, it sort of implies that like maybe an alien race would decode the golden disc in this completely different way. Maybe they would see it as an act of war or something. Who knows?

Matt: 20:27

Yeah. I see his discussion of chauvinism Almost like an assumption of defaults.

Jon: 20:33

Yes.

Matt: 20:34

Yeah, like, wait, is this universal concept only if you assume. The default of, you know, the Earth's mass.

Jon: 20:42

Right. Like before we discovered mass and gravity, that was our understanding of the universe.

Matt: 20:48

Right. And I think. If there's like a, a larger personal takeaway, it's like two, two. Be aware when. One of those intrinsic assumptions becomes violated, you know, it's like you learn that. The gravitational force between a human and the moon is different than the earth. I think it becomes problematic when you. just stick your head in the sand and you're like, Nope, this is like, wait, is the thing everywhere.

Jon: 21:12

Yep. Gotta hear new facts. And, uh, you know, put them into your being, allow them to influence you.

Matt: 21:19

Yes. Yes.

Jon: 21:21

And, and that's actually all I had. I mean, maybe that's a, a good note to end on is to be open minded and allow your worldview to be altered slightly

Matt: 21:31

I like how put it update, your worldview. as new facts come into your and your brain.

Jon: 21:36

Exactly.

Matt: 21:37

All right. I will see you next time, John.

Jon: 21:40

See you later, Matt.