10 ms·

What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a

by skizm 10y ago

What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased (since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable language has to contain numbers of some kind (at the very least the concept of singular vs plural). So start with "one" and "two" or maybe even the concept of nothing vs something. Work your way to vocab words related to space and time (again, I would think these universal concepts considering the aliens traveled with the goal of getting to earth), then get into specific human concepts like me vs you vs third person. They essentially worked through language in the same way you would work through language with a human baby, which I think would get you no where when talking to an alien race (who are "adults" at this point you would assume, and have their own fully developed world views). Just my 2 cents though.

plttn 10y ago
If I remember the book correctly, they talk more about their attempt at using numbers, but due to the way heptapods think (all of time happening at once), the math concepts are actually harder than physical concepts.
- lutusp 10y ago
  > If I remember the book correctly ... No book, sad to say. The movie is based on a Ted Chiang short story named "The story of your life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life There are a number of books out there named "The Arrival" or a variation thereof, but they have no connection with the movie. I only post this to keep people from ordering books with that name, hoping to acquire more depth than the movie provides. Not to disparage the movie, which I regard as first-rate.
  - plttn 10y ago
    Right. I meant to say the short story.
- rthomas6 10y ago
  If I remember correctly, in the short story, the heptapods had a more fundamental grasp of calculus and continuous math, and derived algebraic concepts from that. Kind of like the inverse of how humans do it.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  That came out in the movie too, and it was not remotely believable there. It was where you had to turn on your suspension of disbelief and enjoy the Blinkenlights.
mci 10y ago
You have reinvented the idea behind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language)
TuringTest 10y ago
I'm not so sure that numbers are universal. If your species were hive-like or highly solipsistic, you wouldn't necessarily have the need for numbers (although it is still plausible that they could use "us" vs "them", or "myself" vs "the outside world", but that's not exactly the same as "plural"). Even humans have languages that don't have numbers above of "one, two, three, many"; so long for generalized numbers being a universal concept.
- sidegrid 10y ago
  How would you build a spaceship (or international ship... Whatever) without a concept of numbers?
  - Razengan 10y ago
    How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their senses may be such that they interpret a distinct shade, or a "step" or "tick", after a small difference in wavelength/frequency, and they use those steps to represent integers, and a transition between two shades to represent fractions.. So if I want to tell you I want 1 of something, I just show you a deep violet. If I want 2, I "say" a ever-so-slightly less saturated violet. Green may mean a million, and reds would be used for astronomical scales. :) But they may not "think" in terms of "numbers" as we do; they would just see and imagine colors and associate them with a sense of quantity, or comparison.. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500
    - Udik 10y ago
      Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.
macintux 10y ago
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but didn't the physicist start with numbers before Adams' character was involved, and get nowhere?
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  Yes, in the movie they mentioned that, and also later on after Adams' character made her initial breakthroughs, they also mentioned that they figured out enormously complex human concepts are like fundamental building blocks to the aliens, while simple human concepts like numbers were a gulf of complexity to communicate between the species.
lkrubner 10y ago
It's important to be open minded when thinking about how alien life might perceive the universe. In that spirit, and being deliberately provoking, I previously wrote: Was math so universal that any intelligent species discovered the same math as what humans had discovered? Could there be a universe where irrational numbers were the primitives upon which all mathematics was based, in the same way that humans based all of their mathematics on the prime numbers? Was there a “beautiful” universe in which irrational numbers did not exist, and all patterns were simple? Perhaps there was a universe which lacked electromagnetism, and, even as our universe had atoms whose changing bonds explained all physical phenomena, perhaps that other universe had manifields whose changing coordinate systems, mapping one dimension to another, explained all physical phenomena? Our own universe was composed of 3 solid dimensions and then a fractional 4th, but what would life be like in a universe that consisted only of fractional dimensions? How could aliens imagine something whole, if nothing in their universe was whole? How could such aliens imagine a “one”, an integer, something complete? Perhaps in such a universe the integers were the most difficult concept in math, only discovered after thousands of years of careful research. Perhaps there was an alien far smarter than any of his peers, admired even as we admire Einstein, whose greatest accomplishment was the discovery of the formula “1 + 1 = 2”, a formula which, in that universe, was so utterly counter-intuitive that most adults went through their life without ever understanding it.
katamaritaco 10y ago
For what it is worth, numbers are not necessarily a 'universal concept'. One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708001042 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- 3131s 10y ago
  One of the reasons Everett is talked about so much is because his claims are controversial. Many linguists have criticized his methodologies. I have a background in linguistics but have never looked into Everett's work too thoroughly, but from what I have seen I am skeptical of his claims that Piraha lacks recursion. Still, an interesting line of inquiry and it would be nice if there were enough linguists to actually generate a wide body of research on the many endangered and minority languages. As it stands now, most languages are dying out almost completely undocumented.
  - panglott 10y ago
    AIUI, the controversy was generated based on definitions within generative linguistics that were ambiguous; the Chomskyans clarified what they meant by "recursion" for their purposes, and the controversy should have evaporated. That didn't stop the Chomskyans from getting Everett barred from conducting research among his friends the Pirahã or documenting their language. http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous-dispute/ http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poiso... If I had to boil it down to a sentence, Everett's claim ultimately was not that the Pirahã can't think recursively, it's that their language reflects a cultural aversion to referring to things that aren't concretely present, and this impacted their grammar for subordinating clauses. OTOH, and quite separate from the recursion issue, there has been some really interesting research on Pirahã perception of number. The ScienceDirect link/paper in the parent is well worth your time; it's also here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5308732_Number_as_a_Cognitive_Technology_Evidence_from_Piraha_Language_and_Cognition https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5308732_Number_as_a... and background at LanguageLog http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=341 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=341
johnchristopher 10y ago
Have you read the short story the movie is based on ?
Razengan 10y ago
I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting, but kind of a hackjob for measuring. Like sure, integers may exist in reality insofar as there may be one tree, two trees... but what about weight, speed, gravitational acceleration? An alien species may use entirely different systems for Counting vs. Measuring. We even found out that numbers may be "complex", have multiple dimensions. Beings exitsting in 4+ spatial dimensions may "write" in 3D; using Platonic solids to represent integers and fractions, and spheres for measurements? And just as how humans took a while to come up with the concept of zero, could such a hypothetical 4D being have a hard time thinking about the idea of 1?
- deleted 10y ago
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  - Razengan 10y ago
    Ah I meant 1D. My thought train at the time was occupied with our writing systems being 2D.
    - thanatropism 10y ago
      So, that's the whole thing about manifolds. A (hollow) circle lives in 2D space, but is actually one-dimensional. How so? I can continuously map it to two 1D structures, one straight line for the top part and one straight line for the bottom part. Now, there are moments (such as a cursive "e", for example) where our line crosses itself (so there's a point in two different "regions" of the line), so we can't say that all cursive writing is 1D. But it's darn close to being so. What's more: even though our characters are darn-close-to-being-1D, the text we write with them is 1-dimensional. Some concrete poetry has tried to be two-dimensional, to little effect, but we mostly have sequential thoughts and a sequential language -- and only 1D structures can be sequential.
rdtsc 10y ago
Walking and eating are also universal. Because they can actually eat something in front of them and point to it. They can walk in front of the aliens and point to the action and say "this is what we area talking about". Consuming nutrients and locomotion is not a bad first thing to focus on. Numbers are more abstract. They couldn't just draw a number "2" for example. Or show 2 apples because it might seem they are just talking about apples and not numbers.
lmkg 10y ago
I thought it was strange that they started with "walking" because the aliens don't walk the same way humans do! Numbers are probably not a good starting point, because they're surprisingly abstract. For example, there's no such thing as 1. You can have one of something, but you can't just have one. Number is a quality rather than a thing. In order to establish communication, you need to start with something where it is completely unambiguous what you're both referring to. You can do this with concrete things, not so much with qualities. Numbers above one are even harder. There's no such thing as 2. You have a thing, and you have another thing. In order to get to two, you first have to establish the idea of the one thing and the other thing being similar. Then you have to find a way of making it clear you wish to refer to the collection of things, which is an abstract thing. Then, you need to somehow figure out how to make it clear you wish to refer to this abstract quality of quantity about this abstract thing, rather than some other abstract quality about it such as its permanence or utility or orientation. Compared to this, talking about objects and actions seems a lot easier.d
- panglott 10y ago
  It just falls apart when you try to define mass nouns in terms of number. Different languages handle mass and count nouns different, just as Japanese where nouns have no inflection for number and you use conventionalized counter words to indicate quantity. "This is eight milk". Cups of milk? Glasses of milk? Cartons of milk? Liters of milk?
- mamcx 10y ago
  > I thought it was strange that they started with "walking" because the aliens don't walk the same way humans do! Neither dogs (Dogs don't(?) think(!) in that as "walking"). You still walk with your dog, and I think most people see a dog walking, and think: "Is walking!" Even if the way aliens "walk" were more like "swing" them see us moving from A to B. Maybe them translate them as "Moving from A to B". The we show them "running", and them translate it as "Moving from A to B faster". Eventually, them see a dolphin, and is moving more like them. Maybe them translate it as "Moonwalking". Still, different words and concepts from them eventually must equal to our own, and even if are not a perfect 1:1 translation is enough to convey things. For example, some ancients languages have different words for "Love" but ours use adjectives for them.
M_Grey 10y ago
I don't know about numbers... but something absolutely and physical might be useful? Representations of the hyperfine transitions of hydrogen would be one obvious one that any spacefaring species would have to recognize.
SkyMarshal 10y ago
Fwiw the movie Contact got this part right, the aliens sent a language based on "universal" mathematical concepts, and once the humans recognized the "primer", or translation key, they were able to reconstruct the data the aliens sent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePa6eUxhkYo&t=4m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePa6eUxhkYo&t=4m40s
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deleted 10y ago
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panglott 10y ago
Also, those in here arguing that numbers are fundamental, basic, and universal might appreciate Ted Chiang's story "Division by Zero", also in "Stories of Your Life". http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf194 http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumbe...
mamcx 10y ago
Warning: Also not a linguistic! > by using names and human concepts...should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers The way the movie do this make perfect sense. Some examples: - Your tribe in a island make first contact with a advanced civilization. You started with 1 coconut. Then you show 2 coconut. Your advanced emissary think the coconut must the base food of your tribe, and yours is very poor. Numbers rarely are used in abstract ways. Similar in how (big mistake) people try to push programming as math (because "obviously is math"). - You have a baby. To communicate with him, you start with some universal laws that hold across the universe: "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" What you consider universal laws, the most important and more universal, maybe are not the first kind of laws others are thinking. And this guys do everything in perl, his civilization have discovered functional programming and discard them 20 centuries ago as annoying. - Your atlantian civilization, the most advanced that ever existed in earth, make first contact with the atlantian civilization on Andromeda. Both talk in perfect english, obviously. Correctly, you understand this guys must be smart, so you start conversation like this: "So, do you guy know that the Spirit is the same than the Everything times the light instant and the light instant?, and the light instant is perfect and stay always as before or after?, and you spaceship obviously feed on spirits?" Both civilization know than E=mc2, but his notations, names and ways to transcribe them not align at all. And probably sound incorrect nonsense. - You start teaching them your numbering system. Them get confused why 2 + 2 is equal 4. Your numbering system is decimal, them is not. Then you try to showcase that exist several systems. Them start get more confusing. Why your result contradict each time? ---- Not matter how I look at this, walking, eating, you, me, my name, your name look like far more universal and more sensible things to know than anything related to science or tech.
DowsingSpoon 10y ago
Mathematics is founded in logic. You cannot use logic to prove logic. Instead, we start with some axioms and build from there using rules that we think we reasonable and intuitive. I vaguely recall learning about a position in philosophy that holds that these axioms and rules come from the way the human mind is structured. If this is true then there is no reason to think that an alien mind would use the same axioms. For example, something that seems entirely fundamental to us might require a very complicated proof in the alien system. If the two systems are pragmatic and useful then they can produce conclusions that correspond to the physical world, and from there we can relate the two. However, a major plot point in the movie is that time does not exist and that there is no such thing as causality. In the world of Arrival, there is not a lot of reason to believe that mathematics, logic, and science are capable of bringing us to a true understanding of the universe. It wouldn't work to teach human mathematics to the aliens because human mathematics is weird and wrong.
- canjobear 10y ago
  > For example, something that seems entirely fundamental to us might require a very complicated proof in the alien system. True, but there is a bound on how much complexity of a concept can differ across axiom systems. Complexity (up to an additive constant) is an objective fact independent of any particular axiom system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invariance_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...
eveningcoffee 10y ago
Perhaps even something more abstract like circle or boundary (drawn on the ground with chalk) and in and out.
wmeredith 10y ago
The way they started the conversation in the film was with identity which is pretty damn universal to intelligent life.
- erispoe 10y ago
  How do we know that? I'm not sure identity as we know it is required for intelligent life to develop. We know other mammals share it but they're pretty close to us evolutionary speaking. Eusocial intelligence (ant-like) wouldn't need that, because they're not individuals, and each colony or group of colonies form one big organism. Could eusocial intelligence develop to the point of being capable of interstellar travel? It seems plausible under the right circumstances. Such an intelligence probably wouldn't understand the concept of individual identity...

by skizm 10y ago

plttn 10y ago

If I remember the book correctly, they talk more about their attempt at using numbers, but due to the way heptapods think (all of time happening at once), the math concepts are actually harder than physical concepts.

lutusp 10y ago
> If I remember the book correctly ... No book, sad to say. The movie is based on a Ted Chiang short story named "The story of your life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life There are a number of books out there named "The Arrival" or a variation thereof, but they have no connection with the movie. I only post this to keep people from ordering books with that name, hoping to acquire more depth than the movie provides. Not to disparage the movie, which I regard as first-rate.
- plttn 10y ago
  Right. I meant to say the short story.
rthomas6 10y ago
If I remember correctly, in the short story, the heptapods had a more fundamental grasp of calculus and continuous math, and derived algebraic concepts from that. Kind of like the inverse of how humans do it.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
That came out in the movie too, and it was not remotely believable there. It was where you had to turn on your suspension of disbelief and enjoy the Blinkenlights.

mci 10y ago

You have reinvented the idea behind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language)

TuringTest 10y ago

I'm not so sure that numbers are universal. If your species were hive-like or highly solipsistic, you wouldn't necessarily have the need for numbers (although it is still plausible that they could use "us" vs "them", or "myself" vs "the outside world", but that's not exactly the same as "plural"). Even humans have languages that don't have numbers above of "one, two, three, many"; so long for generalized numbers being a universal concept.

sidegrid 10y ago
How would you build a spaceship (or international ship... Whatever) without a concept of numbers?
- Razengan 10y ago
  How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their senses may be such that they interpret a distinct shade, or a "step" or "tick", after a small difference in wavelength/frequency, and they use those steps to represent integers, and a transition between two shades to represent fractions.. So if I want to tell you I want 1 of something, I just show you a deep violet. If I want 2, I "say" a ever-so-slightly less saturated violet. Green may mean a million, and reds would be used for astronomical scales. :) But they may not "think" in terms of "numbers" as we do; they would just see and imagine colors and associate them with a sense of quantity, or comparison.. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500
  - Udik 10y ago
    Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.

macintux 10y ago

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but didn't the physicist start with numbers before Adams' character was involved, and get nowhere?

yourapostasy 10y ago
Yes, in the movie they mentioned that, and also later on after Adams' character made her initial breakthroughs, they also mentioned that they figured out enormously complex human concepts are like fundamental building blocks to the aliens, while simple human concepts like numbers were a gulf of complexity to communicate between the species.

lkrubner 10y ago

It's important to be open minded when thinking about how alien life might perceive the universe. In that spirit, and being deliberately provoking, I previously wrote: Was math so universal that any intelligent species discovered the same math as what humans had discovered? Could there be a universe where irrational numbers were the primitives upon which all mathematics was based, in the same way that humans based all of their mathematics on the prime numbers? Was there a “beautiful” universe in which irrational numbers did not exist, and all patterns were simple? Perhaps there was a universe which lacked electromagnetism, and, even as our universe had atoms whose changing bonds explained all physical phenomena, perhaps that other universe had manifields whose changing coordinate systems, mapping one dimension to another, explained all physical phenomena? Our own universe was composed of 3 solid dimensions and then a fractional 4th, but what would life be like in a universe that consisted only of fractional dimensions? How could aliens imagine something whole, if nothing in their universe was whole? How could such aliens imagine a “one”, an integer, something complete? Perhaps in such a universe the integers were the most difficult concept in math, only discovered after thousands of years of careful research. Perhaps there was an alien far smarter than any of his peers, admired even as we admire Einstein, whose greatest accomplishment was the discovery of the formula “1 + 1 = 2”, a formula which, in that universe, was so utterly counter-intuitive that most adults went through their life without ever understanding it.

katamaritaco 10y ago

For what it is worth, numbers are not necessarily a 'universal concept'. One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708001042 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

3131s 10y ago
One of the reasons Everett is talked about so much is because his claims are controversial. Many linguists have criticized his methodologies. I have a background in linguistics but have never looked into Everett's work too thoroughly, but from what I have seen I am skeptical of his claims that Piraha lacks recursion. Still, an interesting line of inquiry and it would be nice if there were enough linguists to actually generate a wide body of research on the many endangered and minority languages. As it stands now, most languages are dying out almost completely undocumented.
- panglott 10y ago
  AIUI, the controversy was generated based on definitions within generative linguistics that were ambiguous; the Chomskyans clarified what they meant by "recursion" for their purposes, and the controversy should have evaporated. That didn't stop the Chomskyans from getting Everett barred from conducting research among his friends the Pirahã or documenting their language. http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous-dispute/ http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poiso... If I had to boil it down to a sentence, Everett's claim ultimately was not that the Pirahã can't think recursively, it's that their language reflects a cultural aversion to referring to things that aren't concretely present, and this impacted their grammar for subordinating clauses. OTOH, and quite separate from the recursion issue, there has been some really interesting research on Pirahã perception of number. The ScienceDirect link/paper in the parent is well worth your time; it's also here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5308732_Number_as_a_Cognitive_Technology_Evidence_from_Piraha_Language_and_Cognition https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5308732_Number_as_a... and background at LanguageLog http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=341 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=341

johnchristopher 10y ago

Have you read the short story the movie is based on ?

Razengan 10y ago

I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting, but kind of a hackjob for measuring. Like sure, integers may exist in reality insofar as there may be one tree, two trees... but what about weight, speed, gravitational acceleration? An alien species may use entirely different systems for Counting vs. Measuring. We even found out that numbers may be "complex", have multiple dimensions. Beings exitsting in 4+ spatial dimensions may "write" in 3D; using Platonic solids to represent integers and fractions, and spheres for measurements? And just as how humans took a while to come up with the concept of zero, could such a hypothetical 4D being have a hard time thinking about the idea of 1?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
- Razengan 10y ago
  Ah I meant 1D. My thought train at the time was occupied with our writing systems being 2D.
  - thanatropism 10y ago
    So, that's the whole thing about manifolds. A (hollow) circle lives in 2D space, but is actually one-dimensional. How so? I can continuously map it to two 1D structures, one straight line for the top part and one straight line for the bottom part. Now, there are moments (such as a cursive "e", for example) where our line crosses itself (so there's a point in two different "regions" of the line), so we can't say that all cursive writing is 1D. But it's darn close to being so. What's more: even though our characters are darn-close-to-being-1D, the text we write with them is 1-dimensional. Some concrete poetry has tried to be two-dimensional, to little effect, but we mostly have sequential thoughts and a sequential language -- and only 1D structures can be sequential.

rdtsc 10y ago

Walking and eating are also universal. Because they can actually eat something in front of them and point to it. They can walk in front of the aliens and point to the action and say "this is what we area talking about". Consuming nutrients and locomotion is not a bad first thing to focus on. Numbers are more abstract. They couldn't just draw a number "2" for example. Or show 2 apples because it might seem they are just talking about apples and not numbers.

lmkg 10y ago

I thought it was strange that they started with "walking" because the aliens don't walk the same way humans do! Numbers are probably not a good starting point, because they're surprisingly abstract. For example, there's no such thing as 1. You can have one of something, but you can't just have one. Number is a quality rather than a thing. In order to establish communication, you need to start with something where it is completely unambiguous what you're both referring to. You can do this with concrete things, not so much with qualities. Numbers above one are even harder. There's no such thing as 2. You have a thing, and you have another thing. In order to get to two, you first have to establish the idea of the one thing and the other thing being similar. Then you have to find a way of making it clear you wish to refer to the collection of things, which is an abstract thing. Then, you need to somehow figure out how to make it clear you wish to refer to this abstract quality of quantity about this abstract thing, rather than some other abstract quality about it such as its permanence or utility or orientation. Compared to this, talking about objects and actions seems a lot easier.d

panglott 10y ago
It just falls apart when you try to define mass nouns in terms of number. Different languages handle mass and count nouns different, just as Japanese where nouns have no inflection for number and you use conventionalized counter words to indicate quantity. "This is eight milk". Cups of milk? Glasses of milk? Cartons of milk? Liters of milk?
mamcx 10y ago
> I thought it was strange that they started with "walking" because the aliens don't walk the same way humans do! Neither dogs (Dogs don't(?) think(!) in that as "walking"). You still walk with your dog, and I think most people see a dog walking, and think: "Is walking!" Even if the way aliens "walk" were more like "swing" them see us moving from A to B. Maybe them translate them as "Moving from A to B". The we show them "running", and them translate it as "Moving from A to B faster". Eventually, them see a dolphin, and is moving more like them. Maybe them translate it as "Moonwalking". Still, different words and concepts from them eventually must equal to our own, and even if are not a perfect 1:1 translation is enough to convey things. For example, some ancients languages have different words for "Love" but ours use adjectives for them.

M_Grey 10y ago

I don't know about numbers... but something absolutely and physical might be useful? Representations of the hyperfine transitions of hydrogen would be one obvious one that any spacefaring species would have to recognize.

SkyMarshal 10y ago

Fwiw the movie Contact got this part right, the aliens sent a language based on "universal" mathematical concepts, and once the humans recognized the "primer", or translation key, they were able to reconstruct the data the aliens sent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePa6eUxhkYo&t=4m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePa6eUxhkYo&t=4m40s

deleted 10y ago

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deleted 10y ago

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panglott 10y ago

Also, those in here arguing that numbers are fundamental, basic, and universal might appreciate Ted Chiang's story "Division by Zero", also in "Stories of Your Life". http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf194 http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumbe...

mamcx 10y ago

Warning: Also not a linguistic! > by using names and human concepts...should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers The way the movie do this make perfect sense. Some examples: - Your tribe in a island make first contact with a advanced civilization. You started with 1 coconut. Then you show 2 coconut. Your advanced emissary think the coconut must the base food of your tribe, and yours is very poor. Numbers rarely are used in abstract ways. Similar in how (big mistake) people try to push programming as math (because "obviously is math"). - You have a baby. To communicate with him, you start with some universal laws that hold across the universe: "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" What you consider universal laws, the most important and more universal, maybe are not the first kind of laws others are thinking. And this guys do everything in perl, his civilization have discovered functional programming and discard them 20 centuries ago as annoying. - Your atlantian civilization, the most advanced that ever existed in earth, make first contact with the atlantian civilization on Andromeda. Both talk in perfect english, obviously. Correctly, you understand this guys must be smart, so you start conversation like this: "So, do you guy know that the Spirit is the same than the Everything times the light instant and the light instant?, and the light instant is perfect and stay always as before or after?, and you spaceship obviously feed on spirits?" Both civilization know than E=mc2, but his notations, names and ways to transcribe them not align at all. And probably sound incorrect nonsense. - You start teaching them your numbering system. Them get confused why 2 + 2 is equal 4. Your numbering system is decimal, them is not. Then you try to showcase that exist several systems. Them start get more confusing. Why your result contradict each time? ---- Not matter how I look at this, walking, eating, you, me, my name, your name look like far more universal and more sensible things to know than anything related to science or tech.

DowsingSpoon 10y ago

Mathematics is founded in logic. You cannot use logic to prove logic. Instead, we start with some axioms and build from there using rules that we think we reasonable and intuitive. I vaguely recall learning about a position in philosophy that holds that these axioms and rules come from the way the human mind is structured. If this is true then there is no reason to think that an alien mind would use the same axioms. For example, something that seems entirely fundamental to us might require a very complicated proof in the alien system. If the two systems are pragmatic and useful then they can produce conclusions that correspond to the physical world, and from there we can relate the two. However, a major plot point in the movie is that time does not exist and that there is no such thing as causality. In the world of Arrival, there is not a lot of reason to believe that mathematics, logic, and science are capable of bringing us to a true understanding of the universe. It wouldn't work to teach human mathematics to the aliens because human mathematics is weird and wrong.

canjobear 10y ago
> For example, something that seems entirely fundamental to us might require a very complicated proof in the alien system. True, but there is a bound on how much complexity of a concept can differ across axiom systems. Complexity (up to an additive constant) is an objective fact independent of any particular axiom system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invariance_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...

eveningcoffee 10y ago

Perhaps even something more abstract like circle or boundary (drawn on the ground with chalk) and in and out.

wmeredith 10y ago

The way they started the conversation in the film was with identity which is pretty damn universal to intelligent life.

erispoe 10y ago
How do we know that? I'm not sure identity as we know it is required for intelligent life to develop. We know other mammals share it but they're pretty close to us evolutionary speaking. Eusocial intelligence (ant-like) wouldn't need that, because they're not individuals, and each colony or group of colonies form one big organism. Could eusocial intelligence develop to the point of being capable of interstellar travel? It seems plausible under the right circumstances. Such an intelligence probably wouldn't understand the concept of individual identity...