The question of whether I'd attempt to decipher the code depends on whether I believe it would be intellectually engaging to do so. In the case of a code, yes,

The question of whether I'd attempt to decipher the code depends on whether I believe it would be intellectually engaging to do so. In the case of a code, yes, that probably requires that the code encodes something meaningful. But it's not hard to think of structures where interesting patterns emerge without the structure having externally imbued meaning (or at least, it would be terribly difficult to prove that it does). Game of Life would be such an example: it's a structure that arises from some simple logical rules, there is seemingly no meaning behind it, but it produces interesting patterns that many people have studied extensively.