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Who says raster is a universal way to serialize an image? Who says a serializable image is probably rectangular? Who says the notion of serialization is a uni

Who says raster is a universal way to serialize an image? Who says a serializable image is probably rectangular? Who says the notion of serialization is a universal? What are alternatives to any of these? Can we exhaust the alternatives? (Finally, a question that has an answer: no.) Who says sampling or quantization are universals? In order to know what they might do, let alone how, we would first have to know why. And their why is not going to be our why. Anybody's why is determined by what they are right up against. (This is why evolution immiserates, because it guarantees that we spend most of our time at the boundary of our envelope.)

PaulHoule 1y ago
I'll argue that serialization is universal, there are so many cases in technology where you can scan something with a rotating or moving platform, it takes rather sophisticated electronics to implement "holographic" protocols such as the FFT, Borrows-Wheeler Transform, Deep Interleaving, Forward Error Correction, etc and I just don't see how you get to the place where you can build that kind of thing without breaking things down logically into systems that use serialization. I am sure that aliens who can build computers know about the halting problem but they probably formulate it differently. [1] I doubt they have 8-bit bytes. They probably, like us, skipped Indium Phosphide, Gallium Arsenide and such for Silicon, but I'm not so sure about that. [1] Turing started out with a line of though that seems oddly disreputable now: we know most of Cantor's phony numbers (that we call the "reals") don't have names [2], but some of them, like π do. Is the difference between the named and nameless ones that we can program a Turing machine to print out the named ones? [2] ... hence less "real" than the integers
- FrankWilhoit 1y ago
  Zoom out. Remember all the technologies that have been backed into wrong-way-first. Future humans, leave aside aliens, will be unable to distinguish between the engineering drawings of anything that has moving parts and the cartoons of Rube Goldberg. Remember Haldane (the quote is also attributed to Jeans, Hoyle, Eddington, and various others): "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." (The one thing that they will have, even if to their distaste, is powers of 2.) ETA: If Turing was trying to make a distinction between the finiteness of the symbol for (say) the square root of three, versus the infinitude of the process that must be executed to evaluate it, that would be not so much disreputable as nonsensical. He was fond of setting up straw men; let us suppose that this was one of them.

PaulHoule 1y ago

I'll argue that serialization is universal, there are so many cases in technology where you can scan something with a rotating or moving platform, it takes rather sophisticated electronics to implement "holographic" protocols such as the FFT, Borrows-Wheeler Transform, Deep Interleaving, Forward Error Correction, etc and I just don't see how you get to the place where you can build that kind of thing without breaking things down logically into systems that use serialization. I am sure that aliens who can build computers know about the halting problem but they probably formulate it differently. [1] I doubt they have 8-bit bytes. They probably, like us, skipped Indium Phosphide, Gallium Arsenide and such for Silicon, but I'm not so sure about that. [1] Turing started out with a line of though that seems oddly disreputable now: we know most of Cantor's phony numbers (that we call the "reals") don't have names [2], but some of them, like π do. Is the difference between the named and nameless ones that we can program a Turing machine to print out the named ones? [2] ... hence less "real" than the integers

FrankWilhoit 1y ago
Zoom out. Remember all the technologies that have been backed into wrong-way-first. Future humans, leave aside aliens, will be unable to distinguish between the engineering drawings of anything that has moving parts and the cartoons of Rube Goldberg. Remember Haldane (the quote is also attributed to Jeans, Hoyle, Eddington, and various others): "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." (The one thing that they will have, even if to their distaste, is powers of 2.) ETA: If Turing was trying to make a distinction between the finiteness of the symbol for (say) the square root of three, versus the infinitude of the process that must be executed to evaluate it, that would be not so much disreputable as nonsensical. He was fond of setting up straw men; let us suppose that this was one of them.